the Railway is rerouted for today

I had written these yesterday for my Spoon River Railway project, but not quite finished. I went to post them there, but realized the LJ Content Strike has started. I hadn’t decided unti now whether I was going to participate, but find I just can’t bring myself to cross strike lines. I think it’s partly about having a union rep and a union organizer in my immediate family and partly that this is about improving communication between the management making decisions and the people who are affected by them, which is something I spend a lot of my working life on. Another thing I work on is trying to help people make decisions based on actual fact, something with which LJ has had some issues. (A past example is when they outlawed certain interests without realizing that people might have listed them, not because they wanted to participate in some of the more abusive ones but because they had suffered from them and wanted to share experiences with others who were healing). It’s not the making a mistake I have as much trouble with, as the not stopping to investigate.

Also, of course I support point 4 of the strike reasons: “Homophobia, misogyny, and racism must not be a part of the decision making processes about appropriate content of the site”.

Given that I have this journal it’s not particularly difficult for me to honor the strike, anyway, so I would feel especially bad not honoring it. So here are the thoughts of two regular riders on the Spoon River Railway; I will post them here to make sure I don’t lose them, and will put them up in the usual place tomorrow.

Kinshaye Washington

All these people, riding the train.
I guess most of them are going to work or school.
I wonder how many of them will make decisions today.
All, probably. You can’t do anything,
Can’t finish your gum without deciding,
Spit or swallow? Trash can or sidewalk? Which trash can?
Life is decisions.

But I wonder how many of those decisions
Will literally save or end someone’s life.

And I wonder, also, why it is
That whenever I get to wondering
About the life-or death responsibility
On a doctor’s shoulders, the rest of that day
Is always full of hangnails, heartburn, and gout.

Norris the Fiddler

Spring is coming!
I’ve been seeing
Wisps and mists of green.
Bumps on trees where buds will be
Tiny slivers spearing thawing ground,
Where hyacinths soon will stand.

When you stand in the same place
You get to noticing things.
In my first years, I noticed signs of spring.
After a while I noticed signs
That signs of sprng were coming.

Now mostly what I notice is people
Noticing spring, or not-noticing
There are the ones who I think
Could live forever without seeing spring,
And I wonder, what are they here for then?

There are the ones who love the year’s renewal
Whose mood rises with the rising sap,
Returning light, quickening life, things growing
They rejoice, asking only wholly to be a fool
While Spring is in the world.

And then there are the ones who are busy, distracted
Yet for an instant their head rises
Responding, alerted, to what rides the breeze:
Whatever memories they lay away with this day
Are perfumed ever after with the scent of Spring.