I wonder if you, my reader, has noticed the change--or one of the most conspicuous of the many changes--that has overtaken this country of ours in the past decade. Ever since the topic of population control became for mysterious reasons unmentionable--perhaps in line with the Bush administration's attempt to substitute the ludicrous idea of abstinence for birth control information--, the number of people, the sheer number of people, has exploded. Every highway is now packed with traffic at all hours of the day and many of the night; the concept of rush hour has been submerged. We are still a one person-one car nation of automobile fanatics and even the recent increases in gas prices seem hardly to have made a dent. At what level is our addicton to motion, to entertainment and to endless wars linked inexorably? When does war become--or as had it already become--mass entertainment?

California and Florida, where I've recently spent time, are nothing but four-lane highways jammed with massed cars. Strip malls and acres of parking lots have destroyed what were once simple open spaces, fields, swamps, woods, nothing worthy of "preservation" as it is imagined, now: the preservation of something unique, like the red rock formations in the Utah desert. When does plain, ordinary open space, with its spindly trees, weeds and tufts of browning grass, become unique, invaluable, essential? How much of the new transporation stimulus package is directed at more throughways, more bridges, more destruction of open space too ordinary ti be valued?

We are still a country bent on infinite expansion, of our empire, of our possessions, of our developments, of our entertainment, of our waistlines. Nothing is capable of bringing us to heel, except a national catastrophe, such as overtook the south in 1861-65, the destruction of land, of people, and of a way of life as well as its supporting mythology.

Where is our national catastrophe, or when? 9/11 did nothhing of any value; we simply became more--more greedy, more paranoid, more intent on endless revenge.

What will it take? The final poisoning of our environment, the destruction of species through global warming (but does anyone care about that when heading for the tenth time to the mall)?

I hear and see the destruction of open space in the destruction of the language we share, its beauty and precision now almost completely lost.

"That sucks," a young woman says when she hears of a friend's grandmother's death. "That sucks."She has no more idea of the derivation of the expression than she has of the meaning of death.

IN THESE HARD TIMES, IT'S INDEED ENCOURAGING TO SEE THAT A NEW LITERARY MAGAZINE, EPIHANY, IS BORN. ITS FIRST ISSUE, "NAKED IN THE BOWERY", WILL BE AVAILABLE ANY TIME NOW. MY NEW STORY, "THE MONKEY'S UNCLE," WILL BE PUBLISHED IN EPIPHANY'S FIRST ISSUE. PLEASE LOOK FOR IT; IT'S A STORY SET MANY YEARS AGO, A FIRST FOR ME, AN ATTEMPT TO INJECT A LITTLE SHARP HUMOR INTO THE ICONIC STORIES OF THE TURN OF THE LAST CENTURY......

We used to hear a while back that we women don't deal well with anger. I don't remember what reasons were given for this oddity; perhaps we were over-socialized, taught to be too nice, or generally uneasy with powerful emotions.

This never made much sense to me. I certainly know what it is to be angry, to lose my temper and say what I shouldn't say, and certainly I've known at least a few other women who experience anger, although sometimes only in the form of a sharp sarcasm--the cruel remark, half disguised with humor, that strikes deep because it can't be responded to except by another piece of ersatz humor....

This may be part of the reason I was so startled yesterday during the Sunday service at my progressive Episcopalian church, progressive in that its mission statement welcomes everyone, and in that we fly the rainbow flag and fill pews with every kind of person--the old, the disabled, gay couples, sinlge people, and the only dark-skiined people I've seen in my all-white neighborhood. Dark-skinned people in Santa Fe are more and more restricted to the south side of town....

We were at the point where the minister asks for visitors to stand up, introduce themselves and say where they're from, always a pleasant moment that ends in applause. As usual, there were people from all over, including a skeletal young man who stood to say, "I'm from Texas and I know Jesus said that if you are gay, you can still repent and be saved."

This was smoothed over by other introductions and then applause. I looked at the young man with some curiosity; he was very pale, as well as very thin, perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, with two girls abotu the same age beside him.

A moment later, the trio stood up as though on command and marched toward the door. There, one of the girls turned and screamed into the congregatio, "REPENT OF YOUR SINS AND BE SAVED!" The three then left.

It was the rage in her voice that startled me more than her words. Our legislature is considering legalizing partnership agreements, which has stirred up a fair amount of opposition, even here; apparently the Texas trio had come, or been sent, to visit our church before launching their tirade in the legislature today.

And they were young.

How did this pretty young woman, made-up and carefully dressed, arrive at that scream?

Where were its roots?

Had she known someone she thought was gay, and suffered some injury from that peson?

It seemed unlikely.

Instead, her rage had swollen like an infection around a point of pain, a splinter, a shard of fear that could only be excised when she found someone to blame. "They"--those others, those mysterious, threatening people were not so much the object of her rage as its excuse.

Something else more profound was working here, like yeast in a particularly ugly lump of dough.

But what?

I've been wondering for a while now how we women escaped the tar brush hat has blackened all those CEOs and bank executives and insurance giants who have brought this country to its knees....

Should we welcome the exclusion?

Well....

Now the New York Times, that fountain of all wisdom, has printed an op-ed piece by Michael D. Kristof (Feb 8th) that gently and gingerly touch on this issue.

Some enterprising scientist has revealed tht men with heightened testosterone levels gamble wildly with other people's money. When those levels drop--maybe with age, or something more decisive?--the gambling slows down, and we don't lose so much money...

Do you remember women were supposed to mess up the universe because of our pre-menstrual madness?

I wonder if we could have done as much harm?

Somehow, I doubt it....

According to Kristoff, at a cponference of something called the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the absence of women from these top-level financial jobs was discussed again and again. "Wall Street is one of the most male-dominated bastions in the business world," he stated--hardly surprising after months of breakiang news stories where women's names never appear.

Kristof is wary of these discussions, and these scientific findings (there are now several of them) but he does conclude that "looking at evidence of how homgeneous groups go astray, lets hope that banks seek a little more diversity on thier own...."

As we all know, nothing like that happens without some kind of legal prodding. After all, "diversity" usually means more than one other kind of human being. The financial clubs are no more likely to look for ethnic diversity than they are for women to control some of their madness--and what woman would want to be put in that position, anyway?

But don't we hear that large numbers of women are now graduating from business schools?

Where do they go?

Is that nice lady teller at my local bank really all we have to represent us as our savings and our income go down the drain?????

Driving half way across the country means motels, and motels mean nuisance TV. There isn't enough time to read between pulling in in the late afternoon and going to bed and so channel surfing takes over.

In the aftermath of the downed flight in the Hudson River, a week ago, varuous commentators are trying to keep the story alive. After all, there's only so much soft news to go around. We flip to Dr. Phil interviewing the survivors of that flight; one is in tears before the good doctor launches his first question. The interviewee is sufffering from nightmares, reenactments, headaches and episodes of crying; Dr. Phil commiserates. The wretched man is afflicted with survivor's guilt.

But everyone on the plane survived.

Perhaps he feels guilty beccause the plane was injured? But even the plane was dragged out of the Hudon River and will soon be in service again, maybe even with some simple device to warn off droves of fat Cananda geese.

How did we become so soft, so self-serving? Is the real attraction of the military, to so many, that its discipline relieves us of these shameful sensitivities?