No More Fairy Tales, XXXVII
leafless trees rub
against the smoggy sunrise
smell of the wind
FYI: BBC News, Nov.3: Schools close in Lahore as pollution hits record level
Unprecedented air pollution in the Pakistani city of Lahore has forced authorities to close all primary schools for a week.
From Monday, 50% of office workers will also work from home, as part of a "green lockdown" plan. Other measures include bans on engine-powered rickshaws and vendors that barbecue without filters...
Raja Jehangir Anwar, a senior environment official, said the "biggest headache" causing the smog was the practice of burning crop waste, known as stubble, across the Indian border.
Aurangzeb said the fumes were “being carried by strong winds into Pakistan”.
And this haiku could be read as a sequel to its preceding entry:
No More Fairy Tales, XXXVI
New Delhi draped
in layers of toxic haze
this sense of dread
as October rolls around
chokingly dark... and darker
FYI: New Delhi started the week with a PM 2.5 concentration nearly 80 times the World Health Organization’s recommended limit, according to Swiss air quality company IQAir (2023 survey)
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CXXII: "bombed schools"
a drift of olive leaves ...
my Gazan friend's kin living
in various bombed schools
FYI: This haiku is a sequel to the following:
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CXIX: "olive harvest in the West Bank"
the sun glints
on a settler's M-16 ...
olive harvest
Added: Between Heaven and Hell, I
Two Americas
the White House
surrounded by a metal fence
ten feet high ...
this is America, and yet
the other America
this chilly night
stretching thousands of miles
behind the day
November 6th, the veil thinnest
between Heaven and Hell
Not Going Back
painted in large blue letters
on the billboard
in autumn morning chill
Not crossed out with red paint
FYI: "The other America" first appeared in Martin Luther King Jr's "March 14, 1968" speech (where he was interrupted over and over by hecklers calling him a traitor), describing the differences in what life is like for Black/African-Americans. And Former U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate John Edwards used the "Two Americas" concept in a 2004 speech, making it into a catch phrase referring to social stratification.
And Haaretz, Nov. 6: Trump's Win Reveals the Inconvenient Truths About America
These two Americas are generally divided by two fault lines – education and gender – and are underlined by two very different political-social-cultural coalitions. Political scholar and journalist Ron Brownstein encapsulated them astutely and incisively as "transformative" and "restorative."
The "transformative" Democratic coalition is a diverse grouping made up of women, non-white Americans, voters with college degrees, urbanites and big metropolitan suburbanites, liberals and younger voters.
The "restorative" Republican electoral coalition is predominantly white, male, lower-middle class or working class, rural or living in a town of less than 100,000, without a college degree (mostly), earning less than $100,000 and angry that the America they know is "being taken away from them" by those liberal coastal elites who control the government.
