People are not for sale. This plot might have possibilities beauty is extinct because no one has time for appreciation... this has been replaced by absorption. In self defense people become self absorbed - this is meant to help them defend themselves against the onslaughts of commercialism.

If Vonnegut is right and all life is an extension of high school (and we are limited here to speaking of United States high schools, since no country structures this experience quite the same way as any other). Here the politicians are those kids who didn't understand academics but knew how to get cars and dates, the police are the kids who despised gym, the homemakers are the girls who couldn't do math. Or could but lied about it. And me? What becomes of us?

The age of Aquarius is reputed to belong to those who can be technological and genderless. Instead it seems more likely to be the age of geeks and those whose gender does not determine their entire repertoire of decisions and choices.

When we transcend time and space then what becomes important? Are there then any human qualities which are valuable, outside of specific time and space considerations? That equation can be worked only in one direction... in other words, no value that cannot extend its beneficence into the specificities will be considered valid, it will remain a Platonic, Hitlerian pressure towards perfection unless it has ramifications in the realm of the real that promote and enhance life as it is lived within space and time contingencies.

However, some space and time considerations are too small to contain the rising of conscious love we wish to experience and so the new age will make room in us, a tolerance will be created, for the experiment of expanding our possibilities and all human realities that bring pleasure, connection, illumination, consideration and care will be highlighted and extended practically to infinity.

ann emily brodkey
June 1999