January 15, 2002
Odd but perhaps telling interlude about a country's nostalgia for happier days, in Nancy Dewolf Smith's Afghan Dispatch, in yesterday's Opinion Journal:
A country where the fruit hung so heavy on the trees, an old man once told me, that when it fell to the ground nobody bothered to pick it up, but people simply walked through carpets of mulberry slush, like the rest of us wade through mud or snow at certain times of year. A country where there was crime, to be sure, but where a kind-hearted king pardoned every convicted murderer except one, a case where the family of the victim refused to grant permission for a death sentence to be lifted.
These memories, gilded with nostalgia, sustained Afghans for so long.
Not to deny a troubled people their dreams, but it seems a golden age that included blanket pardons of convicted murderers, as well as the wasting of natural resources (not to mention the accompanying mess and odor) might not be the best foundation to build a future on.
A country where the fruit hung so heavy on the trees, an old man once told me, that when it fell to the ground nobody bothered to pick it up, but people simply walked through carpets of mulberry slush, like the rest of us wade through mud or snow at certain times of year. A country where there was crime, to be sure, but where a kind-hearted king pardoned every convicted murderer except one, a case where the family of the victim refused to grant permission for a death sentence to be lifted.
These memories, gilded with nostalgia, sustained Afghans for so long.
Not to deny a troubled people their dreams, but it seems a golden age that included blanket pardons of convicted murderers, as well as the wasting of natural resources (not to mention the accompanying mess and odor) might not be the best foundation to build a future on.
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