Issue 294 | The Sun Magazine

June 2000

Readers Write

Making A Difference

Boxing lessons, frozen puddles, individualized sandwiches

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his right and left hands. He uses both.

Saint Catherine of Sienna

The Sun Interview

Nothing To Lose But Our Illusions

An Interview With David Edwards

What prison could be more secure than one we’re convinced is “the world,” where the boundaries of action and thought are assumed to be, not the limits of the permissible, but the limits of the possible? Democratic society, as we know it, is the ultimate prison, because who’s going to try to escape from a situation of apparent freedom? It follows, then, that we must be happy, because we can do whatever we want.

By Derrick Jensen
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

On The Suffering Of Little Things

Everyday tasks become difficult when one constantly worries about the suffering of little things. There are times when I can’t mow the lawn because there are too many grasshoppers dancing about.

By Sybil Smith
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Giving

My mother insisted on visiting me in Guatemala, where I was working as a Peace Corps volunteer, despite my exaggerated warnings about how difficult — how incommodious, how dangerous, even — life there was. I knew my scare tactics would fail; had I been a soldier in a war, my mother would have parachuted into my foxhole.

By Mark Brazaitis
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Advice To William Somebody

I can’t count the number of times I have officially assembled the equipment to take my life: a knife, a handgun, a plastic bag, a bottle of codeine and a fifth of vodka.

By Poe Ballantine
Fiction

Cementhead

I can see where my spit blood turned the ice pink. Finally, I catch him in our goal crease. We butt heads before I haul him down and fall on him with my stick over his throat. I lean on the stick and grind a little until I feel that collarbone give — ka-pop.

By John Tait
Photography

Whispered Prayers

Photographs By Stephen R. Harrison

I did not know, for example, that in 1950 the Chinese government initiated a series of invasions that, within a decade, would result in the occupation of the whole of Tibet and the eventual death of more than 1.2 million Tibetans — about one-sixth of the total population — due to political persecution, imprisonment, torture, and famine.

By Stephen R. Harrison