The past year posed difficult questions about the ability of the developed world to respond to adversity.
From old friends, I received strange reports about my old hometown (Chicago) -- scenes that are hard to imagine, like mid-day empty L trains, stores boarded up on State Street, scared pedestrians rushing home down empty residential streets.
Every day waves of hatred, sponsored by Dell Computers and Mountain Dew, surge through the sinewy network of corporate-synchronized emotion, uniting an otherwise isolated populace in blind rage.
The West is frayed, bloodshot and fading. To even be a paper tiger, we'd have to have a paper mill somewhere, and agree on what a tiger is.
South Dakotans have long admired the prairie pasque -- a resilient flower that blooms in the contested interval between winter and spring.
As a transplant, I admire the pasque and the somewhat inharmonious, parallel modes of place-centered resilience the various pasque-like peoples of the Dakotas have developed over the course of their difficult history.
In any case, the pasque are here, though not for long. May we all imbibe some of their determination.