This is not really a bad winter, but I don’t take them as well as I used to. I often think of T.A. Daly’s poem, Da Leetla Boy. (Daly worked for a while in a grocery store where he studied his customers’ Italian and Irish accents.) I remember the lines:
I no can count how many week,
How many day that he ees seeck,
How many night I seet and hol’
Da leetla han’ dat was so cold.
The little boy did not make it through the winter, and it made me think of what the immigrants of those days and today go through here in the North. I am all for a better policy at our borders, but I’m also for kindness toward the immigrants who are already here.
Balancing the Judeo-Christian “laws” of kindness with instinctive acts of self-protection is sometimes a difficult task. But I’m confident we can do it.
Civilization 