Gated Communities
adj: A refuge for people you'd not choose to be marooned with on a desert island under any circumstance...especially if you are "different".

These new implantees are afraid - afraid of crime, of not having access to water for their green-grass shawl, of the unexpected anything, of the non-traditional, of the blacks, browns, the needy, and the less-well-off ... they want to be surrounded with like-minded, mentally self-contained neighbors who have "made-it". Somewhere quiet, somewhere in a dream-state where no discord appears suddenly to disrupt the "perfect day". Tiny boxes, on the hillside, all shiny and new, made out of ticky-tack.

Uniform. Traditional. Defensive. Believing in the universality of their conceits. Always ready to eat-in, hire-in, sleep-over, or suit-up-for some gathering of sycophants. Comfortable with the status quo, since that's how they got where they are - and heavily concerned with the security aspect of their enclosures - since someone - everyone they fear - will try to get what they have accumulated...accompanied by, to hear them tell of it, tear drenched recitations of their own personal efforts rising to confront all challenges - conveniently ignoring inconvenient truths.

Picasso on the high side, Van Gogh on the low...when what they really prefer is Rockwell, or to the more daring...Wyeth. Eagerly infusing themselves with art and culture from an endless stream of lesser lights, destined to be totally ignored by history.

People who are, in the classic rephrase: 'A light they were to no-one but themselves'.
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Which hereby serves to end this mini-tirade.

A poem by Robert Frost shines a light on a differently enclosed man...Frost's poem: "An Old Man's Winter Night" follows...

"All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him — at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; — and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man — one man — can’t keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night."