288 / Collateral Damage

Thomas Carlyle suggests that we can create new personalities, and a world entire, by "putting on new clothes." Such human works of creative design come from a conscious act, in which our exuberant or more restrained ideas of what we should create prevail as we "tailor the cloth."

Other realities we create, however, may be more inadvertent than deliberate, at least for the first time, and such subsidiary realities can be quite harmful. "Collateral damage" can result from our perhaps well-intentioned actions.

Once we know this, though, and in Santa Cruz we have a piece of art to remind us, the damage we do is no longer inadvertent.

As we blow up families in the Middle East, to fight against terrorism, we are cutting the cloth for our own shrouds, as well as theirs.