Spring and the Corona Lunacy
Saturday gratefuls: Brenton and his concern for Murdoch. Nursing assistant skills I’ve learned. Kate’s reduced leakage. Rigel, that rascal. Her spring fever digging at the edge of our deck. The solar snow shovel. Thursday’s snow all gone on the roadways. Remembering Mom and the garden spider at our breakfast table window. Trips to Stratford, Ontario.
Watching Orwell come alive again. Still. With Trump. Using the word liberated to incite insurrection against legally elected government officials. LIBERATE MICHIGAN! Even Minnesota. Calm, orderly, polite, compassionate Minnesota. Treason is a capital crime, a crime emanating from our capitol. Playing to his base in the basest way possible: hand out money, fan understandable frustration into the flames of unrest. Friends, it’s alternate universe time.
Life in the slow, slow, sloth lane. While all that swirls around, we eat breakfast, feed our dogs, shake our heads.
And in the third year of a faux monarch’s reign came a plague, not just here, but all across the world. Before this plague our country, beautiful and vibrant, had become ugly, violent, cruel. Now we’re sick and dying. What the hellfire and brimstone preachers called Old Testament times. Yet it is not long ago, not in a world of different customs and languages, but in our time, in our nation. It makes my heart sick. My head ache.
How can we teach our grandchildren that this is not what a nation is? When the Wizard of Oz pulls the curtains aside himself and makes clear that all he has are levers and knobs and steam whistles where competency need to be, what do we say to them? How do we explain that we have stood for freedom, for true liberation, for inclusion, compassion for the poor, the sick, and the elderly?
It was true in my memory, I’ll say. No, of course it was never all this or all that, of course not, but never did we have a party and a President who made it their holy crusade to pollute the rivers and skies, cage children, glorify sexual predation, and those made ill by race hatred. Never did we have a President and a party who praised our enemies and blamed our allies. America, like any nation, has always had greed, servants of Mammon, but rarely have we turned our government into a mechanism for siphoning money from the poor into their hands.
No, I’ll say, this is not us. It just is not us and it will require your good will, your good sense, your compassion, your sense of justice to make right. I hope you, Ruth and Gabe, can muster all these, can grow into the leaders who remedy the failures of this time. I will support you and any of your generation who are able.
