Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

Sunday gratefuls: Alan. Tom. The Ancient Ones. Honesty. Clarity. Friendship. Kep and Rigel keeping us warm over a cold night. When I woke up this morning, Kep’s head was next to mine. Orion and his great dog headed over Black Mountain to hunt. The great bear pointing to Polaris. The North. The West. Two directions I know personally, deeply. Adulting. The isolated Covid life. Buh bye orange one. Old friends, docent friends. Art. All of it. Ode’s. Jimmie’s. Rembrandt’s. Noguchi’s. (first thing that has impressed me about Melania.) Coltrane’s. Mozart’s. Nabokov’s. Tolstoy’s.

Resolved. Happily. Detriangulated. Whew. Being an adult can be so damned hard. Even at 73. Key? Trust. And, a helpful Kate.

I’m getting there. Trying to understand why 70,000,000 plus of my fellow citizens voted for he who shall not be named except in an indictment. Trying to understand what that means for the future of our nation. This week I’m going to start sorting through the tea leaves. 538. Politico. NYT. WP. Even Newsmax, the new go to conservative (wacko conservative) news site. Books like Upswing by Robert Putnam. Seeing what my conservative friends post on Facebook. Listening to the wind. Where will it go? This may be he who will not be named except in an indictment’s true wall. A wall dividing the American people rather than that other one stiff arming the poor and the suffering.

Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”:

A quick reference to this poem pointed out that what doesn’t like a wall is frost. Or, Frost. Or, me. Or, maybe, you.

It will be decades before these wounds can be mended. Like Frost’s neighbor there are so many of us who believe “Good fences make good neighbors.” So many who insist each time a fence or wall gets breached, we have to run, repair it, make it tight. Perhaps if we weren’t so quick to defend our field. Maybe this field we could let lay fallow for a few years. Let the wall stay down for awhile. Maybe it would stay down. We could walk back and forth, visit each other’s farms. Yards. Political parties. Find a way that supports the nation rather than our faction.

I say that, yes, and mean it. But, I also say, burn their house’s down, salt their fields, and deport all of them. We are none of us one thing.

Let’s tear that Blue wall down. Replace it with a renewed culture of protect and serve. Yes, really. That slogan’s good enough already. Let’s figure out how to implement it for real in our cities.

Raise the minimum raise. Put a wall between our fellow citizens and poverty. Yes, wall it right out of our country. We can use the stones from taking down these other walls. This will require rethinking capitalism. I’m a fan, as I’ve said before, of a mixed economy*. Read Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. The question is the mix. We’ve not got it right here. And, we need to.

We’ll build solar farms, windmills, geothermal sites. We’ll switch off the internal combustion engines and leave the oil in the ground. Change the offshore drilling platforms to research laboratories, small countries, hell, even hotels. We’ll use carbon capture technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. We’ll stop putting up a carbon wall between ourselves and space. Cool ourselves down.

That South Dakota nurse. Did you read her story about dying patients who still don’t believe in Covid? Well, here’s the wall we need right now. A wall around each home until at least January 2nd. Get the holidays behind us before we get over our self-imposed or state-imposed lockdowns. Or, maybe a wall until the vaccines have been given at least to us old folks and medical personnel. Or, maybe until, this is the one that makes the most sense to me, we flatten the curve. We’ve never done it. We can do it. We need to do it.

So. Let’s build a few walls, tear down others. Get to the point where we don’t need them. Soonest. But, hard.

*A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, free markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise.^[1][2][3][4] While there is no single definition of a mixed economy, one definition is about a mixture of markets with state interventionism, referring specifically to a capitalist market economy with strong regulatory oversight and extensive interventions into markets. Another is that of an active collaboration of capitalist and socialist visions.^[5] Yet another definition is apolitical in nature, strictly referring to an economy containing a mixture of private enterprise with public enterprise.^[6] Alternatively, a mixed economy can refer to a socialist economy that allows a substantial role for private enterprise and contracting within a dominant economic framework of public ownership. This can extend to a Soviet-type planned economy that has been reformed to incorporate a greater role for markets in the allocation of factors of production.^[7] Wiki