Samain and the Moon of Radical Change

Tuesday gratefuls in post below

Midday reflections. Distracted, edgy. Finding it hard to focus. Sifting through various websites. 538. NPR. NYT. WP. Everyone’s so well, I’m not sure yet, yes he has a chance, you can’t tell what all the early voting means.

Cleaned my computer screen. Keyboard. Swept up around the computer and table. Keeping busy with thing that don’t need to be done. Now or even soon.

It’s only 1:50 pm, Mountain Standard Time. Polls are open. Ballots take marks. Get put in machines. ID’s get checked. I served several elections as an election judge in Anoka County. It’s stultifyingly boring work. Unless a problem happens. Hmmm. Can we accept the trash collectors bill as evidence of residence? No, that ballot is spoiled, you’ll have to do another. All the time sitting in metal folding chairs. After a while these old hips were not happy, especially since we had to get there before 7 am and couldn’t leave until the polls were closed, the machines tallied, and printed out. Right now there’s some old whitefella or blackfella deciding this is the last year to put up with this nonsense.

For the individual voting is or at least can be, a fraught process. Do I really have to say? Is it necessary to choose only one? What does that proposition or referendum really mean? Do I care? But it’s over in a matter of a few minutes. Unless you dither. A lot. The aggregate of all these actions is not over in a matter of minutes. Sometimes not even days, weeks, months. It was 36 days after the election that Gore conceded to Bush II. We’re in for a pins and needles moment collectively and it could last (please election gods, no!) into 2021.

Distraction quotient on the rise. It’s now 3:20 p.m. Nobody really knows what’s happening. All of us have a guess, but guesses are worse than polls. Aren’t they?

Gonna post this and go downstairs. I bought a prime rib roast for Kate and me. Baked potato, Caesar salad. Cookies. This is a celebratory meal in anticipation of Biden’s win. Kate suggested if, god forbid, Trump wins, that we have liver and onions tomorrow. Penance. If that happens, I’ll feel like liver and onions so I won’t need to ingest it. But, I don’t think it will. This will have been a prescient meal, a foreshadowing of the good about to drape itself over our Covid tattered shoulders. May it be so. Blessed be.

Samain and the Moon of Radical Change

Tuesday gratefuls: Voters all across this land. BLT’s. Supper last night. The time change. Finally, standard time. Hello, darkness my old friend. Workout. Adding stretches. Back quieting down. The sun rising, red clouds like a Maxwell Parrish sky. Or, an old Western.

What are we to say now? The ink spilled over this day would fill even Paul Bunyan’s accountant’s ink barrels. Me, I hope Babe the BLUE Ox is on his way to D.C. to toss the red buggers out.

I’m feeling overly optimistic, unduly confident, oddly hopeful. Partly from all the early voting. Partly from, yes, the polls. Partly from a sense that voting, as it gathers our collective wills into a sharp spear, will not miss our common target, the enemy of our political system. Partly because I just plain want a Democratic victory, a blue tsunami, a wave to the future.

Most generations of human kind have lived and died in surroundings and with expectations that were familiar, often perhaps not comfortable, but at least predictable.  We have had the unique opportunity to live over an unpredictable time span. Many of you who read this were the result of the end of a World War. Our lives shaped by a desire put aside the angst of bloody Europe and the violence in Asia. The conformity of the 1950’s grew from this soil.

That worked for a while. Levittown. Oh, so, white Levittown. Those factory jobs that paid a middle-class wage. Even for folks who hadn’t finished high school. The wife at home. The kids with their lunch boxes hopping on yellow school buses. Cars made in the USofA. Also, back alley abortions, lynchings, blatant housing and employment discrimination, repressed sexuality.

Then all us kids got old enough for college. And those idiots in the White House decided to keep Southeast Asia free from Communist China’s inevitable victory there. Thousands of us died. Draft eligible. That was me. And millions of other young men. Our generations lives began to churn. Old ways got tossed out. Men and women saw each other in a different light. The established order rocked back on its heels. Then, fought back itself.

Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump. Computers. The internet. Social media. Climate change. Wildfires. Pandemic. The death of compassion. Here we are now. Looking out our lock down windows at all the people passing by, masks on, masks off, not Halloween. Scarier, much scarier than Halloween. This is real.

This is not a kumbaya moment. It’s a moment of stark reality, a moment in which it matters what you think, how you act. May it work for us all. Blessed be.