Pray for Death
by Richard Oxman

If you don't have the time, don't do the crime.

Whether or not you believe in this or that God, whether you believe in any god whatsoever-you must fall to your knees in prayer. And pray for the death of a number of people. Each and every day.

You can do other things too, of course, and probably should-though not the *usual* things, as a rule.

Whose death?

Quite at random –in no special order– let's start with a handful of biggies, leaving out, of course, a huge number of -deserving- other biggies.

1. The death of all U.S. troops who fire a-anything-from *this day forward*.

2. The death of all people driving the worst model Hummers.

3. The death of all governors permitting the death penalty to be carried out.

4. The death of all corporate employees knowingly falsifying information/being disingenuous-who make over $100,000.00 annually-before taxes.

5. The death of all people who torture living creatures-of any species.

If you don't like my short list (compiled on the way to organizing an act of arson), tell me if you think the following “articles” (writing or reading them) would be a better use of heartbeats than praying.

A. Tom Kerr's putdown of Sean Hannity in http://www.counterpunch.org/kerr04102006.html , wherein we learn ONCE AGAIN how bad the Fox host is-and the like.

B. Amy Goodman's coverage of how certain people are not being *welcomed back* to New Orleans a la http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/10/1348252 , wherein one of the premises is that the city can be viewed as any more inhabitable than, say, the uninhabitable Salt Lake City, Utah (Oh, you didn't know?!).

C. The Dave Edwards piece ( http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=10070  ), wherein we learn zero new about Venezuela-or anything related to it.

In fact, for fun, why don't you go ahead and make a long list of ALL the go-nowhere work, the monumental wastes of time for the citizens who primarily review the three sites invoked above.

For fun, if you're not going to pray. Or do anything.

You should have lots of time.

Richard Oxman, info@parisgraves.com, has his most updated versions of articles at www.oxtogrind.org. He is quite serious about the recommendations for prayer, and about the difference between the value of his action-oriented writing-and what he calls bloodless, habitual writing. In his view, valuable/beautiful writing/work which is *not* action-oriented appears on all three sites noted here-intermittently.