Daily Archives: August 19, 2009

Dogs

The Girls After Their Operations

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                         Waning Green Corn Moon

We move into the new moon tomorrow, the moon that will see us well into September, the harvest moon.

Rigel and Vega do not feel good.  They have lain around ever since returning from the vet and their surgery.  When I came downstairs, they lay together, Vega’s head on Rigel’s chest.  Littermates hang together throughout life; Hilo and Kona still  sleep together and cuddle, 8 years after leaving mom behind.

I guessed Vega’s weight to be  90 lbs and she weighed out at 86.5.  I guessed Rigel at 73 and she came back 74.5.

Political agony has not ended with the demise of the Bush administration.  Now we begin to see why the left has not trusted the Democratic party for years.  Even with solid majorities in both houses division between fiscally liberal and fiscally conservative Democrats make passage of health care reform of any meaningful kind unlikely.

Dogs, Politics

Free kittens. Spaded.

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                    Waning Green Corn Moon

Rigel and Vega have returned home, a bit foggy and uncertain.  Spayed now, they have to be on home rest for the next 10 days.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll make that.

Kate and I saw a cute poster on the bulletin board posted in the airlock going out of the Festival Grocery.  Done in crayon it said, “Free kittens.  Spaded.”

These lectures on the cycles of American political thought I’m listening to right now have prompted a considerable amount of noodling, most of  it focused right now on the central paradox of our democracy.  A solution borne of the Enlightenment, our government and in particular our Constitution and Bill of Rights makes a lot effort to protect the individual and that crucial virtue which ensures individualism, liberty.

The paradox at the core of our nation is this:  government exists to co-ordinate and organize a community, yet its chief underlying value is individualism.  Thus, the purpose of government, focused on community, stands over against the individual it exists to preserve.  This paradox, unresolvable, lies at the fulcrum of so many of our political disagreements.  I’m not any further along with this right now, but its on my mind.