But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,

And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are.

                                    Walt Whitman, “Long, too long America”

“A Winter of Anguish for Minneapolis Children”. That’s the headline of an article in today’s New York Times, and really … what else is there to say? As the United States approached its nineteenth-century civil war, Walt Whitman asked if we were capable of show the world what our children en-masse really are. Are we? By something like a popular vote, “citizens” of the United States elected a government hell bent on imposing suffering on our children, en-masse.

Whitman ended his brief, five-line poem: “(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?)” Who indeed.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image: Henri Matisse, “.L’Angoisse qui s’amasse en frappant sous ta gorge…”  – “The Gathering Anguish That Strikes in Your Throat”/ Museum of Modern Art)