When I Set Out To Become An

I Have A Kind Of Respect - A Worshipful Attitude, Even - For Nature And The Natural Order And The Cosmos And The Seasons.

I Set My Star So High That I Would Constantly Be In Motion Toward It.

I Do Know That I'm Responsible Not For What Happens, But For What I Make Of It.

To Simply Wake Up Every Morning A Better Person Than When I Went To Bed.

But Perhaps More Important, As Someone Wishing To Make A Comment Or Two About Contemporary Life And Values, I Don't Have To Dig Through Libraries Or Travel To Exotic Lands To Arrive At A View Of Our Modern Situation Refracted Through The Lens Of The Preindustrial World, Or The Uncommercialized, Unfranchised, Perhaps Unsanitized-and Therefore Supposedly More "authentic"-perspective Ofthe Third World. Very Simply, This Is Because That "other" World, As Alien As If Separated By Centuries In Time, Is The One From Which I Came