The importance of labelling

Labels are often decried as being destructive, and indeed often they are. People rightly see labels as ways of boxing other people into fixed roles which limit their ability to be all they can be and give all that they have to give. A child labelled "the troublemaker" or the "class crown" or "the responsible one", a work colleague labelled "a shirker", an  old man labelled as 'dirty", an ethnic minority labelled as "stingy" or "criminal" or "subversive" - these labels are ways of discounting the other, and often of holding them to the worst or least appropriate of their behaviours. They have been rightly challenged, as has been the need to assign (and reduce) people labels in the first place.

But like everything, labels also have a positive side. labels sometimes allow pople to articulate to themselves their usefulness, their value, and as such become the platforms from which people can operate more effectively in the world. They can also put other people at ease so that they have enough of an initial "take' on you for an ineraction to begin with some (admittedly arbitrary) orientation points they have in terms of their framing of you:: "Hello, I'm an...a accountant / farmer/ revolutionary / poet / in sales / fitter and turner / mechanic/ lawyer/ publisher/ social worker/ full time mom etc."

I often what label to asign myself when presenting myself to people, what label I can produce that adds value and dignity to myself, gives a comfortable sense of solidity and area of expertise. I have variously across the years presented myself (in person, or perhaps on a busines card or CV)as a student, soldier, journalist, writer, poet. scriptwriter, lecturer, teacher, film maker, wannabe filmmaker, corporate worker when I was at Liberty Life, blogger, instructional designer (for elearning) online content creator, dad, husband, cousin of, bar mitzvah teacher, Hebrew teacher, Jewish studies teacher/ children's author etc - depening on the time and context. Some of these labels ring more sexily in my ears than others, are seen as bestowing me with more dignity and value than others, as having the capacity to help create an intial orientation on the side of my interlocutor of interest or "respect."Now as I decide what ticket to present to the world next I cast around for convincing and solid labels; poet and psychotherapist; counsellor and poet; counsellor and communicator bla bla bla. Eventually I will come to something that feels reasonably solid, that reflects some of what I am and do, which i can occupy for a good few years, and which enhances my usefulness and value both in my own eyes and in the eyes of others.

It seems to me - and this is really the point of this post and the rest a long preamble - that a really useful thing that a therapist can do with clients is help them find affirming labels for themselves, even when at first this seems like a very big challenge. Not with a high functioning client who is a CEO or CFO or who has a distinct professional identity (dentist, tax consultant, architect) or commercial identity (real estate agent, commodities broker), or a "tradie" as they call them in Australia (plumber, electrician, builder) but with someone who may be unemployed, unemployable, between jobs, wrestling with an addiction, awaiting trial or post incaceration, a survivor of some kind of abuse - they too have their story and they too could benefit from a calling card. What could the card of a homeless schizophrenic be? If she sometimes manages to walk dogs, or do a bit of gardening, she could be a "household assisstant" or "botannical worker" or, if she just walks around the streets a "neighnbourhood patroller." "Survivor of domestic abuse" or perhaps just "Survivor" Street poet? Cleaner? "Evoket of compassion." "addiction expert" - the call is to get creative and find something that fits for the client and facilitates new movement. That allows them to present themselves to themselves (and then to the world) in a new way.

Obvioulsy phony and politically correct labers which try to avoid substantial work JUST with a new label are not going to do the trick. we are talking here of providing labels which are a starting point towards wellness, which help provide people with a few cms of psychic turf onwhich to stand as they try to figure out how to be usefully in the world.  
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The therapist as parent...yes, but also sometimes the therapist as witness, modelling for the client how it is to be with what arises, without acting out or suppressing, just gently meeting, being with, seeing - "the seeing is the doing" (Krishnamurti)
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Psychotherapy is like poetry; there are more people teaching and offering it than those who want to consume it....as it says in the Talmud "more than the calf wants to suck the cow wants to suckle"
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To Gerday Boyesen:

my peristaltic rythms testify 
I am ripe
so let me be harvested
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At the borders of the body-mind entity
somatic psychotherapy

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The best "therapy" (and what a loaded term that is)
happens between a good enough mother *
and her infant
in the first year
of embodied life
get that kind
and every other you receive
will just be a refresher course
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* (or father or caregiver)
 
 

BDS and Political Correctness

Is the BDS (Boycott Dirty Semites) campaign just another vehicle for people to express their resentments without having to own that that is what they are doing? Does it offer people a way to express and nurture and feed their resentment of Jews while supposedly doing it for the sake of Palestinians? Does it allow its groupies to express profoundly visceral and irrational and ugly predjudices in a cloak of pseudo rectitude as if they were serving some noble cause? Possible payoffs are:the togetherness of communities built around shared resentment, the avoidance of one's own real issues, the false self esteem that comes with sanctimoniousness, the chanelling of agression and violence towards a relatively safe target (if a few suicide bombers attacked protesters outside a Max Brener shop you'd see a marked fall in attendance by the recreational protestors who are the mainstay of these events) but as it is at the moment there is no overt personal cost for anti-Israeli protestors. (Other than that blindness of lemmings who sacrifice clarity and personal power for the safety and abdication of reponsibility offered by the mob.)

For those who say that the central organising principle of the BDS phenomenon ( I wouldn't dignify it with the name "movement" - is pornography and the millions of people engaged by it a movement??) is a concern for human and Palestinain rights, and not simply a conscious or unconscious visceral resentment of Jews, then why are these same fervent 'campaigners' not organising similar boycotts against Turkey for its ruthless supression of the Kurds and its denial of an autonomous Kurdish homeland, Russia and its brutal suppression of Chechnya, China and its repopulation of Tibet and supression of The Uyghurs (a mainly Sunni Muslim group found throughout Xinjiang Province), Morocco for its occupation of Western Sahara etc.

And how would robbing Israeli Jews of their statehood serve Palestinian interests? Obviously it would only create an enduring passion for Israelis, robbed of their autonomy and rights, to subvert any Palestinian state errected on the ruins of the Jewish one. Are there calls for the dissolution of Turkey so that the Kurds may be free? Or of Russia so that Chechnya can gain its indepenence? Clearly the triumphalist paradigm of BDS does not emerge from real compassion for anyone, but from the desire of people to handle their own psychic garbage via projection, disassociation and splitting.

Four Pesach: The Seder as group therapy, as truth telling, as Satsang

The number "four" plays a big role in pesach. Four cups of wine. Four languages of liberation. Four fore mothers. Four questions.

Four was an important number for Apache Indians as well.

And Jung saw the number four as important too.

For Pesach to be relevant to me, it has to be about individual as well as collective liberation. Indeed, it is worth asking a chicken and egg question: Does individual liberation necessarily preceed collective? Or the other way round? Or do they happen simultaneously? Or is the distinction between the two artificial, and as Sri Nisarghadhatta Maharaj says: "I AM the people." (i.e He is not concerened with helping or saving "them" as he does not see His Self as apart from or separate to "them")

Given the thrust towards individual liberation (and what a virile word "thrust" can be) it would be great to continue the four tradition by inviting each seder participant to proffer a deeply clung to belief that people have begun to suspect may no longer be serving them, and then question it with four questions, courtesy of Byron Katie:

1)Is it true?
2)Can you absolutely know that its true?
3) How do you react, what happens when you believe that thought?
4)Who (What) would you be without that thought?

I often cling to the belief that I am inadequate, that I am not up for the task (and what is the task? Imake that up too, as I go along...)

1)Is it true that I am inadequate? No, in most contexts in my life I seem to be abundantly adequate
2)Could I ever know if I am absolutely adequate or inadequate?No, seeing as I will never know what I'm supposed to be adequate at - all my roles - father, brother, son, lover, provider, dependant, redeemer, destroyer - i have made up, and have made up their content, often by making up what "society" expects of me.
3) How do I react to the thought? I get sad and heavy? I loose contact with "now". with myself, and with the people around me.
4)Who would I be without the thought? Lighter, easier, freer, probably more effective. More generous, more available, more energised.

Nahafoch hu - (Hebrew = "the opposite is true) or in Yiddish: Punkt verkeerd

Turn the thought around

a) to the self ( Its not you who finds me inadequate, I find myself inadequate)
b) to the other (I find you to be inadequate, I judge you and dispense with you in the same way as I judge and dispense with My Self)
c)to the opposite (You find me adequate, I am adequate)

and find three specific, genuine examples of how each turnaround is true for you in the particular situation.

This pesach may we be freed from excessive eating, meaningless ceremony and sterile and platitudinous thought. The invitation to leave the psychic Egypt (in Hebrew etymologically Mitzrayim comes from the root tzar = narrow, place of constriction) requires a pathless exodus along a trail we have never been before. But en-couragement is vital to take the first step, and that we can do for each other, like Penguins on the lip of the Antarctic ice.

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For thousands of years, at various times, there have been Jewish communities in Egypt, many of whom were able to live with a fair degree of freedom from persecution, and in prosperity. I wonder what it would be like as an Egyptian Jew to read the lines in the Hagadah about being brought out of Egypt. I suppose the same as it is for Israeli Jews living in Jerusalem to read the lines about "next year in Jerusalem." These texts and narratives occur in meta landscapes which don't necessarily connect to the physical landscapes in which we move and live.
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faith traditions continue for as long as people cling to the metaphors they provide, or for as long as people find those metaphors more useful or comforting or powerful or better fitting or more accessible than personal metaphors they may be able to develop or that suggest themselves to them. See also being-about-our-business
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Jewdaism and the reduction of suffering

The strange thing about Judaism is that, despite Jewish experince through the ages being so associated with suffering (in the eyes of so many) suffering and the reduction of suffering do not seem to be at the core of its theology. Suffering is a non-issue. What is central is the requirement to perform the creator's commandments, and to believe in a redemptive creator (less central than the former) who acts in history and both creates the conditions for people's bondage and then the conditions for them to become liberated.

While many of the mitzvot (commandments) may have the effect of reducing suffering [and some may have the effect of increasing it] this is never proffered as their primary function. Mitzvot are performed becuase the eternal suposedly commanded them, and if they have some benefit in terms of increasing soial cohesion or individual self esteem, or more profoundly, assisst each individual to express more profoundly what is at the core of their being as created reflections of the divine, than those are added benefits, but not the reason. There is no utilitarian ethos which underpins the mitzvot, and what could be more useful than reducing the ubiquitous suffering which seems to characterize our experience as embodied - read limited -beings?

Interesting to compare and contrast some "mission statements" of Judaism with those of Bhuddism:

"To be a light unto the nations" (Bereishit - genesis)
"He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does Yud-Kay-Vav-Kay require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your G-d." (Mikah)
"Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole [duty] of man." (Kohelet - Ecclesiastes)
"What you yourself hate, don't do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and study." - Rabbi Hillel

Bhuddism
To reduce the suffering of all sentient beings


As for these mission statements, for them to make any kind of sense, what kind of context must be assumed?

That there is a world
That we have bodies
That embodid units - called people - are organised into discreet nations.

Amichai's Jerusalem

On a roof in the Old City
Laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:
The white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
The towel of a man who is my enemy,
To wipe off the sweat of his brow

In the sky of the Old City
A kite.
At the other end of the string,
A child
I can’t see
because of the wall.

We have put up many flags
They have put up many flags
To make us think that they’re happy
To make them think that we’re happy

(Jerusalem, Circa 1959)

Yehuda Amichai is the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David. Amichai's Jerusalem is a 52 minute documentary film about him. And because Amichai lived almost his entire life in Jerusalem, Amichai’s Jerusalem is also a history of the city, beginning with the influx of socialist idealists before the first world war, and ending with the ambiguities of the post-Rabin era. It is history told through the eyes of a poet who scrapes away the layers of dogma to reveal the human presence that gives life to bitterly contested stones.

Who was Yehuda Amichai?

Amichai’s clear, compassionate and sometimes humorous voice has been translated into at least 37 languages including Afrikaans, Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, German, Urhobo (a Nigerian dialect) and Yiddish. "The effect his poetry has on me" said British Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, "is to give me my own life — to open it up somehow, to make it all available to me afresh....and to free me from my mental prisons."

Amichai first arrived in Jerusalem in the 1930’s, and he died there in 2000. His love of, and exasperation with, the city - were always evident:

The air above Jerusalem is filled with prayers and dreams
Like the air above cities with heavy industry
Hard to breathe
(Jerusalem Ecology - 1980)

Amichai’s poems describe the city during British Mandate rule, then as the divided capital of the new State of Israel, with half the city in Jordanian hands, and finally as the unified – but troubled – metropolis it has been ever since 1967. Together with him we visit places which have been the objects of so much conflict and religious fervour - the ruins of the Jewish temple, the mosques, synagogues and churches. And together with him we wonder at the meaning of these places of pilgrimage:

Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel

and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of

tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see the man over there with the baskets? A

little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman

period. A little to the right of his head." ….

I said to myself: Redemption will come only when

they are told, "Do you see that arch over there from the Roman

period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the left and

then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and

vegetables for his family." (Tourists, 1980)

Perhaps because Amichai fought in two wars – he fought in both the British Army during World War II, and afterwards in Israel’s War of Independence – his poetry poignantly evokes the cost of war:

Mr BeMr Beringer, whose son

Fell at the Canal that strangers dug

So ships could cross the desert,

Crosses my path at Jaffa Gate.

He has grown very thin, has lost

The weight of his son.

That’s why he floats so lightly in the alleys and gets caught in my heart like little twigs

That drift away.

(Seven Laments for the War Dead - 1976)

Amichai’s gentle humanism leads us beyond the landmarks to a more intimate and personal Jerusalem – the universities and coffee shops where he taught and wrote, his modest home in the picturesque Jerusalem suburb of Yemin Moshe, the parks and playgrounds where he strolled, the hospitals where his children were born and where he battled cancer, and the secret places where love blossoms:

As from "Thou shalt not seethe a kid

in his mother's milk"

They made all the manifold laws of

kashruth;

But the kid is forgotten and the milk is forgotten

And the mother is forgotten

So from "I love you"

We made all our life together.

But I did not forget you

As you were then.

(Instead of a Love Poem)

Along the way we gain new insight into the lives of ordinary Jerusalemites – Jewish, Moslem and Christian who, despite the weight of the city’s history, must deal with the prosaic tasks of earning a living, finding earthly happiness, and managing to die in their own beds.

This English speaking documentary will feature interviews with Amichai, his family, contemporaries and students, and a soundtrack which includes several of the popular songs made by setting Amichai’s texts to music. Archival footage of historical events – the seige of Jerusalem in 1948, the six day war, terrorist attacks, Sadat’s visit - are interwoven with his poetry – some read by Amichai himself – to form a resonant portrait of both the city and the man.

Amichai’s Jerusalem gives us an inside look into this city of contradictions: a city important to many who live far away from it, but whose status as a symbol can often make life inordinately difficult for those who actually live there. A city of shrines and of pubs, of messianic dreamers and software programmers, a city with sewerage problems, and a city with a seeming direct pipe line to the divine:

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite mountain I am searching.
For my little boy
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure…

Afterwards we found them among the bushes
And our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying
Searching for a goat or a son
Has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

(An Arab Sheperd 1980)

As we see the places which inspired some of Amichai’s greatest work, we emerge with greater understanding of both a uniquely poetic mind, and of a city which struggles to shake off the burdens of the past in order to forge a more satisfying future.

Jerusalem will be a key component of any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Amichai's Jerusalem makes accessible a prosaic, earthly Jerusalem, as opposed to the national and religious symbol so bitterly fought over by faiths and competing nationalities.

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Amichai's Jerusalem: All rights reserved 2002. Amichai's Jerusalem is registered with The Writers Guild of America Registration Department (August 2002 No 883920), and with the South African Script & Story Register (February 2002 -SSR 2713/2002).

The diameter of the bomb

Manofesto cobbled this together in about 2003, when Israel was experiencing a wave of Palestinian terror attacks that left hundreds of civilian fatalaties, thousands wounded and many families struggling with loss and the long struggle of rehab - of people covered by burns, or who had lost limbs or their sight.

Its a rather literal visualisation of a poem of Yehuda Amichai from the 70s. If you'd like to read more of his poems try this post or here.

Poems 2012 - 5772

See also: I hold me


My poems could definitely benefit from some more persona "attitude" - a bit of strut and a bit of playfulness and a bit of gesture...
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Poems and Aphorisms
Immanuel Suttner

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I could get up and walk out
and never come back
just keep walking
past the trucks and houses
garbage bins and trees
junk mail softened by leaves

I could get up and walk out
without turning off the computer
and keep on walking
and never kiss the brows of my boys goodnight
I could walk 'til night falls
and my body shivers in the chilly air
so that all I can think of
is warmth and light

I could walk past the loud
the troubled the stony
until they lost interest
and left me alone

I could walk through green hills
down vaulted dusty roads
past olive groves and spinifex grass
and kangaroos killed by cars
I could rest awhile amongst dancing cosmos flowers
til small crawling things
tasted my flesh
and my flesh walked on
shoes in my hand
gravel piercing my soles

I could crane my neck at the clouds
or stare at the drinks in the back of a shop
so simple these choices
the joy of the road

I could try to leave leave these habits behind
the habit of waiting, the habit of regretting
the habit of fearing what waits on the road
I could walk to a grave yard

where cold winds blow the autumn leaves
and sit and weep at the grave of my longings
for the phantom what-might-have-been

and then I would walk
to a maternity ward
where small beings babble
and despite my accretions
be seduced and make plans
for a wonderful world

and in that walking
that resting
that walking
come to a place
that hangs in the balance
stripped of illusions
kneel in the dust
or stretch to the sunset
and gather wood for the fire.

_____________

The General Theory of Ephemerality

There is a heavenfull of household pets

stocked with time struck love objects

a well worn shoe, a well worn song

that lingered before moving on.

You, who were once, who filled this house

where a phantom cat mauled a phantom mouse

where a phantom dog caked with garden muck

stained the rug, but left time untouched

have gone. I hear time trickling through

while I wonder what else was I meant to do?

Vanished the ghost, and also the wall

into which it fled. Coherencies fall

gravewards, lured by gravity

to weightless amorphicity.

________________________________

the toffee apple of the world

turns out to be an onion

but an onion when alchemised

is also quite sweet.

___________________

I am teaching Yehuda
with a wave of my wand
I pull out the last line
there are oohs and ah's
- an exhalation of emotion
you can always rely
on Amichai magic  

_____________________

she holds down two jobs
gets the kids each day
somehow puts
her anxiety away

washes the dishes
and sobs in the sink
collapses at night
but then can't sleep a wink

goes for a run

_________________

I want peace
to see
what looks out
and becomes disturbed

___________________

 

We are playing tennis
at the time of the third meal
tennis balls whizzing like tehillim
up to heaven
others caught in the net
of earthliness
 _______________
scenario: 4 people are on a tennis court, all of them crouched down,twirlng their rackets, bouncing from foot to foot as if ready to receive serve. This carries on for several minutes with no change - no one serves or receives a  ball. Eventually one of the players "breaks" and says "all right I'll get the bloody balls this time"....

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When someone you were close to dies
there is paradoxically a heightened sense of life
the petty concerns
of the daily grind
dissapear from view
and a strange kind of freedom
pulses within
inviting Itself to be taken up
before the gates swing closed

_______________________

words are historians
inside breakfast
is break-fast
inside shabbat is to sit

______________

you do not need poems
to make you special
and you do not need 'special"
to make you valuable
feel the solidity of
family, home, an income
the power to acknowledge
express yourself
more fully
to those you meet
every day

life signs

traces of margarine in the jam jar
a to-do list receding into the unreachable distance
ants devouring a

dehydrated worm

bird poo on the

brand new car

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 "Why don't you Jews stop moaning about the six million and just bury you're dead and get on with it."
Oh you can't bury your dead because they were cremated or you can't locate the mass graves where Lithuanian and Latvian collaborators shot them ...well then have a memorial ceremony and move on"

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God is the Joy
that dissolves name and form 
I will not die
and I was not born

 ________________________

a plea to suicide bombers:
turn back, he or she
who so chooses
is not a coward
give it another day
don't be so afraid of life
we will hold your hand, we know
though hard and encrusted with bitter thought
it once was soft and warm

______
It's OK for us
to have a little hug
and if I find my hand moving around
to cup your small breast
then let us slowly settle into that too

---------------------

yes we can hug
and if we find my hand
settling on your small breast
that too is just right
________________

I exist
in the creative tension
between left and right
secularism and fundamentalism
rigidity and flexibility
body and soul
if one voice is not representedI feel the tug of redress inside me
reject me or make me wrong and I harden
into what you deny me
embrace me and
I dissolve
___________

Stuck in the cellar
of late capitalist consumerism
and internal contradictions
and running in circles
to be able to look my children and wife in the eye
sometimes the best I can do
is stuff electronic notes into virtual bottles
and set them adrift
on the faceless book

____________________

Sometimes I get a crazy desire to fix things
not the world
for which I don't have a license
but something like an iphone 3
into which a zealous child has stuffed
the sim card the wrong way round
and then i will wrestle with the phone
for hours and hours
until both it and I
are broken

_______

keep your own bees at home
grow your own mushrooms at home
recycle your own sewrage at home
develop your own space industry at home

_____________

Walt Whitman and Alan Ginsberg were list makers, and so am I

____________________

Sri sea

The mottled sea

The throttled sea

The mottled throttled bottled sea

____________________

the dream of abundance

rows of lettuce heads
the smell of ripe manure
worms writhing their fertile dance in the worm farm
dignified deaths
mushrooms bursting out of the decaying log
enough breasts and penises for everyone
the dream of abundance
reclaiming the desert
when I'm lonely
instead of a tv set or pornography
a circle of friends
a dream of abundance
laughing and dancing
hard work and rest in measure
everything coming into balance
once again
_______

An ode to balance
_________

Woman

with a blouse full of

promises

Your nipples

Are the pegs

Which nail my eyes

To your chest

__________

When I die will fish nibble my toes

Will I die with snot in my nose

Will I be buried where nobody knows

And from my belly spring forth a rose?

will I live in silence and doubt

afraid to go in and afraid to go out

or will I sprout like mushrooms after rain

from doubt and decay emerging again 

___________________

I am both the spider and the moth
I have spun a web of ideas
and now am stuck to it

(tell me beloved
do you know of a patent
that dissolves the sticky cords
of our stories?)

______________

What can I do
but listen more and more
attentively
to the river
that flows within

(is it the Ganga
is it haYardayn
or perhaps best of all
the one with no name)
_________________
If I weren't a Jew
I might also say
"you Jew you"
or "you Jewed me"
or "don't be such a Jew"
in that comforting
banter of mateship
where we're us and they're them

etc etc

Does a person
falling into a mass grave
like ae tree in the earless forest
make a sound so feint
that after six decades
it cannot be heard at all?

______________________
At this point
the biggest projects
I can conceive of
are buying a house
and trying to be there as a resource
for my children
ending the predjuidices
outside myself
and more significantly inside myself
seems to big too tackle

_________________

I don't want to die in the middle of things
I'd much rather die when everything has been folded up and put away

________________________

I

If we could build old aged homes
facing the sea
some of the inmates
might be soothed
by the changing constant water
bathing their eyes
on the simple true elements
and if it could not be the sea
then outside the window
birdsong and tree
and if that too cannot be
then a potplant on the window sill
that has been there for years
hardly attended to
a friend indeed
very still and quiet

and if even that is too much then
let it be a mass produced picture on the wall
or if not
perhaps a vivid memory
will bring comfort without even or ever knowing why
and if memories will no longer be summoned
then
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The Israel=Apartheid charge is unhelpful and will not decrease the suffering of either Israelis or Palestinians. Like all charicatures and stereotypes, it settles upon and exagerates a few features, while ignoring and minimising all evidence to the contrary. Far more important than the validity or not of the charge is to ask: who are the accusers? Who are the people who associate around it? Does their self declared concern for "justice" manifest universally, or only re this particular issue? What are their true motives? Before you read the history, ask who the historian is.

______________________

James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake might have said something like this: Sordid Arabia is using ItsRreal as its stewge to fight a closet whore against Iranium

___________

NEWSFLASH:
A 47 year old man has escaped from work. A massive man hunt has been launched. residents are advised to stay indoors.

UPDATE
The fugitive has been found. A community member tipped off the police, who surrounded the escapee. He was on a parkbench, feeding crumbs to the sparrows, but they managed to subdue him.

By the time I turn 50 I would like to have:
ended world hunger
liberated Tibet
made the unconscious mechanism of projection so visible no one could vomit the disowned parts of themself onto the "other"
paid of our large screen television set at which I stare blankly should I not accomplish the preceding items