Undue Pressure

Clear as anything, I can see my mom and grandmother sitting there at our kitchen table cutting potatoes, onions, celery and all the other stew stuff.  I can see them chopping cabbage and dropping it into the old pressure cooker they would later add water to and put on the burner.  That was the point where they ordered us to stay totally away from that stove until supper was finished cooking. 

I can hear that little round valve thing on the lid rattling in the soapy suds as my dad did dishes later on that night. 

Like most of us, I'm guessing, I hadn't thought of those old fashioned pressure cookers in a long, long time.

Now the new images surrounding those pots - someone perhaps sitting at a kitchen table as he or she dropped in things that would never cook up tender - are with us to stay. 

The authorities will eventually release minute details concerning the ingredients in the pressure cooker bombs.  But I believe it's up to each one of us to address what was out there to provide the extreme pressure that turned those inanimate objects into lethal projectiles.

The sources of boundless pressure are everywhere.  Republican extremism.  Democrat extremism.  Assassination by drone.  Same-sex marriage. Immigration.  Guns.  Guantanamo. Abortion.  Big banks.  Our wars.  Our prejudices.  Our medical-industrial complex.  Our economic insanity.  What have I left out?

The vast majority of us simply want to live and cook and then do the dishes in warm sudsy water.  But to ever really enjoy that in the same way again, we have to be heroic enough to reverse the march toward the ballooning polarization that only creates more pressure.