Monday gratefuls: 7 degrees this morning. Up 26 from yesterday. 75th trip underway, go Earth. Joseph’s happy birthday on Facebook. Vaccines. 45’s guilt. Those who know it. Those who don’t. Covid. Winter and all its trimmings.
Sparks of Joy: Kep and food. Rigel’s prance. 45 out, 46 in. Seeing dogs sticking their heads out of car windows. Young children being themselves.
Our house. Needs insulation. When wind blows through the mountains, it also blows through our house. Nice in the summer, not so much in the winter. The windows leak. Doorways, too. Also, the heating of the great room, kitchen, and sewing room is inadequate. If I were married to someone other than Norwegian Kate Olson, we’d have fixed all this years ago. As it is, we usually just put up with it until it gets a bit warmer. -19, however, challenges even Scandinavians. Maybe later this year?
However. We’re much better off than those poor bastards in the South. Respect to all of them for confronting ice and cold in a place ready for neither. Friend Bill Schmidt recounted his daughter Moira’s observation of a highway near their Austin, Texas home. Ice. A hill, a curve. Brake lights. Cars slippin’ and slidin’.
Talk to any Colorado native and they’ll tell you that all of our traffic problems are caused by Texans who move up here. Maybe 5%. The rest is people who just don’t know how to drive.
The lunar New Year has turned us into the year of the Ox. If this is your spot in the twelve year Chinese astrological cycle, you’re likely “Prudent, follow procedures step by step, take things slowly, unlikely to be influenced by others or environment, do things out of personal idea and ability, go ahead steadily and surely, always can achieve the set goals.” This according to Your Chinese astrology website.
As a February pig myself, I’m “…very talented, kind and full of vigor. …lucky to get help from the elders and assistance from benefactors. …could be very dignified and healthy during the life.” Same site. Well…
And, finally, a political thought for today. I agree with the Democrats decision to not call witnesses for Trump’s impeachment trial. The McCarthy call revelation was tasty, no doubt, but the better choice was to finish the trial with dispatch.
No chance for a second narrative to take hold. The House managers did a better than credible job at prosecuting their case and showed the nation Trump’s guilt. The vote would not have changed and having it a short time after their good work underscored the 43 boot lickers’ shame.
We’re a long way from done with all of this; but, now we can move onto the important work. Undoing as much of 45’s legacy as possible quickly and moving on matters too long neglected like climate change, racial and economic justice, immigration, radical police reform.
Sunday gratefuls: -19. Here! Valentine’s Day. 74 round trips, ticket punched. Easy Entree’s. Gifts and good eating. Rigel, who woke me up with a birthday kiss this morning. Kate’s somewhat better day. Snow. We need it. 57 yes. The cowardly 43 lions. Better get to Oz and get some courage. Vaccines. Covid. Third Phase life, it’s sweetness and its bitters.
Sparks of Joy: The heart shaped tin from Easy Entree’s. Rigel’s kiss. George Will. No, really. The loft. Being alive.
Well digger’s belt buckle? Oh, something to warm up with here this morning. -19 when I got up. My weather station so that’s as local as it gets. The weather gods brought me a reminder of my 40+ years in Minnesota. Which hit -50 and lots of other -‘s. Would that it could last longer. We’re still cold lovers, Kate and me, though we have become fans of the solar snow shovel, too. Cold, then warm enough to melt what fell.
In Minnesota my birthday was almost always very cold. Here not as much. So, a nice present. Namaste, divine weather beings.
The Senate vote? Yes, sure. It’s embarrassing to our country, to our democracy, to our civility, to the rule of law, to human decency, but why do you ask? Oh. You thought as, one columnist said, they might not lick his boots? Perhaps you thought that sending an angry mob to fight like hell against their constitutional duty to recognize the votes of our nation would make them change? Now you know what politics are like when fear rules.
The only thing they had to fear, as FDR said, was fear itself. And, unlike our entire nation during WWII, they let it overcome them, those 43 cowardly lions. I agree with George Will, again, “Although not nearly as tragic as 9/11 in lives lost and radiating policy consequences, 1/6 should become, as its implications percolate into the national consciousness, even more unsettling.” Washington Post, 2/13/2021
The Senate vote, while not surprising, suggests something sinister. That those divisions on display on 1/6, and this is Will’s point, I believe, reduced 43 members of the “world’s most prominent deliberative body” to 90 pound weaklings. They fear sand being kicked in their face by the fascist-no-longer-thank-god-in-chief. Who will stand up, agree to be their Jack LaLanne?
Or, their Dorothy? Who might lead them to meet the Wizard? In this analogy Trump would be the man behind the green curtain, turning wheels, pushing levers while looking meek and ashamed when discovered. Yeah, you’re right, this analogy stays firmly in fantasy.
Another point of agreement with George Will from the same column: “An essential conservative insight about everything is that nothing necessarily endures. Care must be taken.” This is a lesson of the Trump years. And, I have learned it.
There is a fruitful, necessary tension between protest and the fabric of democracy. Without it protest would never, could never, succeed. Now though, thanks to the right-wing troops, the real sheeple, I know there is a line beyond which even protest must not go.
In former days I had a thirst for revolution, a dramatic and overall change in our body politic. Back then I refused to believe in human imperfection. If only we could get policies and the economy right. If only we could change the structure of political life. Now, though, I know.
This imperfect institution, our democracy, is exactly as Churchill said, the worst form of government, except for all others. It is fragile and wonderful. When it works, it allows us to fight and makeup. To consider change in our common lives and take action. Yet a man as coarse and stupid and venal as 45 can bring it close to extinction. As Will says, care must be taken.
Saturday gratefuls: Psalms. Rabbi Jamie. Gwen, Ayelet, Dean, Jan, Cherie. The class. Much needed, as I said before. Jackie. Hair stylist and lovely human. Covid survivor. Kep and Rigel, Kate. In our family crate. Yeti blue microphone, a stand. Dreams of podcasting.
Sparks of joy: A new hair cut. Kate’s revived color. Vaccines. Ruth. Hawai’i. Always there, waiting. My poem, Death’s Door. The Trial of 45.
Couple of odd mountain anecdotes involving emergency vehicles.
Told you I bought Kate one of those help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up buttons. It has three receivers. One in the loft, one in the kitchen (for when I have the fans on), and one in the great room. She’s turned over on it a couple of times and alerted me. Learning the system.
A couple of days ago I’d gone downstairs to watch TV. I heard the alarms sound from upstairs. Kate was up there! I ran up. Kate sat quietly at the table, playing solitaire. What? An emergency vehicle had gone by, lights and sirens. Something in its passing, like calling to like, had set off the alarms.
Second story. On Thursday we went into Swedish hospital for another visit with Kate’s pulmonologist. On the way home there were again lights and sirens, Hwy 285 closed ahead of us with pylons and ambulances; police cars just under the overpass where we turn to go back to Shadow Mountain.
I noticed the flight for life helicopter circling above us. It went west over 285, then came back as we routed around the traffic backup. As we made our way back to Barkley Road, it came down, then went back up again as if searching for a place to land. Even though there was a clear stretch of highway.
Jackie, our hair stylist whom we saw yesterday, told us that a man driving a truck that repairs windshields had plowed into the back of a CDOT truck. The workers were repairing the cable that prevents cars from going into the lanes of opposing traffic.
The truck driver died. As we watched, a flight for life was made unnecessary and went back to its home.
Impeachment and Trial. Guilty. You know it. The GOP knows it. Even Trump knows it. See his phone call to Minority leader Kevin McCarthy:
“…in her statement Friday night, Ms. Herrera Beutler recalled a conversation she had with Mr. McCarthy, where the Republican leader described Mr. Trump telling him, as the attack on the Capitol was unfolding, that members of the mob were “more upset about the election than you are.”” NYT, 2/13/2021.
This is state of mind. No uncertainty. Just glee. Put him in jail. Orange for the orange menace.
Rolling the years over for the 74th time tomorrow. That’s beginning to be high mileage. I’m good for another couple a decades, if not more. At least that’s how I feel. Of course, we’ll see.
Gonna cook a special Valentine’s dinner for my sweetheart and always Valentine, Kate. And, for me, too.
Sparks of joy: Birthday coming. Inogen on Mark’s big sketch book page. Gratitude. Waxing crescent Moon. Cold and snow on the way. The possibility of vaccines.
isle of the dead, arnold brocklin
Rabbi Jamie asked us to take six words out of Psalm 23 then write 6 verses using them. I took words from his translation: Death’s door, solitude, fear, harmonies, valleys, and grace. Here is my psalm/poem using them:
Death’s door opens both ways
Into my solitude and back out
Erasing my fear
From its threshold cosmic harmonies spill out
Filling the valleys of our lives
With the grace of eternity.
Kollwitz
I’ve been thinking about radical aloneness coupled with necessary linkages. As humans, our skin bounds us, binds us. Only we know the inner life of our Self, our soul, our unique journey through this random gift of sentience. Yet. We have no language to know the journey without the necessary linkage to another, to others. We have no food to eat without the necessary linkage to the products of the soil. We have no learning without the quickening of our senses by necessary linkages to reality. (whatever that is.)
It’s a peculiar and often devastating truth, our radical aloneness. It’s both ironic and salvific that we cannot be radically alone without necessary linkages to others, to food, to the world beyond us. Covid has made the global scope of our linkages evident in spite of our radical aloneness.
I would say each one of us IS an island surrounded by an ocean of others. On our island are the structures we’ve built, the colors we’ve used to paint them, the roads that lead forward and backward through the story of our life. It is a mobile island. We have to take it with us wherever and whenever we go.
It has rickety bridges, poorly maintained causeways for the transport of food and air. There are several viewing platforms and from our island we can see other viewing platforms. Are they on other islands? A quirk of perception makes it impossible to know.
Even so we are often at our platforms, looking out, using flags to send signals. The others use flags too but we cannot be sure their flags mean the same as ours. They often look similar, but it’s impossible to know for sure.
I’m signaling right now. Arms flashing, plucking flags from their stanchions, returning others. Thinking of you, imagining you and your island. I hope things are ok there.
Wednesday gratefuls: Yeti USB Microphone. Podcasting. Maybe. Impeachment. Trial. Reminder. Biden at work. The boggy reality of our politics. Tom’s poems and science facts. Perseverance, on track for February 18th touchdown on Mars. The things we’ve seen. Wind. Cold. Snow. On its way.
Sparks of Joy: Wolves and their predation. Coming soon to Colorado. Vaccines. Leigh Thompson. Ruth. Seoah. Murdoch. The Sun in the blue Sky.
Just watched two videos, one 13 minutes long and one over 5 minutes. They were evidence in the trial of 45. If you haven’t seen them, maybe you shouldn’t. They’re brutal and reveal the underlying problems we have. This degree of anger and misdirected rage will not slink away. It will be underwritten and reinforced by these videos. They’re good evidence for the trial, no doubt, but I know many of the Proud Boy ilk will see them as moments of glory, as prolegomena to a future assault. A “better” one.
Right now, on this mountain and on the ones nearby, I’m sure some patriots are loading rounds, polishing their weapons, listening to Rush and Alex Jones. When will be the next time to muster ourselves? The constitution has never been in such peril. Our country can’t survive. What if Biden dies and Harris becomes President? We’re all screwed, that’s what. We gotta fight now.
Cousin Diane told me about an NPR report on the flocking of Far Right activists to Germany for rock concerts, gatherings with other, international groups like ours. Germany! The notions of human equality, equal rights under the law, the vote as a means of ensuring democratic governance have their enemies all round the globe.
Yes, this is an imperfect nation. Watch equally disturbing videos from the execution of George Floyd, the shooting of protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin by Kyle Rittenhouse. Remember the middle passage. Jim Crow. Immigrant children separated from their families. News headlines about the Yellow Peril. Women’s suffrage and all the struggles since then for women’s equal rights.
And, yes, these imperfections demand action now. Right now.
These Far Right folks are only part of the barrier to those actions. Corporate capitalism also stands in the way. So does the insidious nature of sexism and racism, infecting many who declare they want to do better. But somehow can’t.
The next few years will be the true trial for this nation’s soul. We will be part of it, you and me. What will your grandchildren say about your actions?
Tuesday grateful: Dr. Leigh Thompson. Zoom. Mary and Diane. Winds auguring change in the weather. Blue Skies and Sun. Safeway pickup. Chili for the snow coming. Melons to cut up. Kate, always Kate. Impeached. Now convict. Go Senate. Vote to shame.
Sparks of joy: The thought of Puppies. Maybe a Puppy here? The brilliant Sun. Walking upstairs each morning to my library and writing studio. Remembering Gertie this morning with Kate. The trial in the Senate.
So obstructionist Senator Mitch McConnell thinks Marjorie Taylor Greene is a cancer on GOP country? Well, I say they’re both diseases that might well prove fatal to our democracy. If not, and I certainly hope not, it won’t be because they failed to take extremist stands when it served them well. Both of them. This is a splendid example of cancer calling the cancer cancer. A metastasized plague on both of their houses.
It ain’t over by a long shot. Imagine all those always Trumpers ought there right now. They’re adding extra flags to their pickups, buying up guns and ammo, donning camo and getting ready to join their friends at your state house. Well-armed militias my ass. These are armed gangs, thugs, waiting for a leader, 45 or someone else, to loose them on their enemies: libtards, Black and Brown and Red and Yellow, all those rainbow folks, politicians.
Oh, wait. 45 did that, didn’t he? That’s what this trial is about in the Senate. Incitement to insurrection. Right. I saw the movie. If they did that, stormed the U.S. Capitol in the name of Gadsen flag patriotism and Confederate Battle Flag dreams, sure seems like they’ll be willing to head into Denver, Sacramento, Indianapolis, Lansing (again).
No, even organized they’re not strong enough or smart enough to fight the U.S. military, but they don’t have to be. All guerillas everywhere know how to carry the fight in asymmetrical warfare. Hell, a lot of those AK47 carrying lunatics probably learned from the Vietcong when they were in ‘Nam. Can you spell irony?
These are our homegrown Al Qaeda’s, Hezbollah’s, ISIS’s. No, not Muslim. Oh, hell no. No rag head holy book for these geniuses. No, they follow the much more holy Q-anon script. Or the rantings of Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones. If it looks like a cult, and quacks like a cult…
This is a long term problem. It’s not one that can be solved by executive order or Federal legislation. Good criminal investigations could cripple the Far Right, though.
Even then, we have to offer a better America to truly and finally counter them. We have to have a just America in which people of color no longer feel Derek Chauvin’s knee on their neck. We have to have a fair America where people of color, the rainbow folks, all left behind citizens have enough to eat, a place to sleep, health care, and the opportunity to not only train for a job but a job itself. In this America the silly buggers in red MAGA hats and American flag clothing will become irrelevant.
Defense and offense. Both will be necessary for years to come. We need to get on with it. Starting now.
Monday gratefuls: Kate speaks her heart. Rigel starts eating again. The Monk Manual. Wind. And the weather it carries. Black Mountain. Maxwell Creek. Upper Bear Creek. Cub Creek. Shadow Brook. Waning crescent Moon. The stars of early morning. The heart that beats in my chest.
Points of joy: Kep eager for breakfast. Being with the Ancient Ones. Imagining more of Jennie’s Dead. Exhaustion after the new workout. Using the Monk Manual.
When I started on the post yesterday, it focused on art, religion, legend, mythology, fairy tales, folklore. Got distracted while writing and shifted away from my main idea. Back at it this morning.
My library has three full shelves of mythology and folklore, its historical context. Another two full shelves of books on art. Another two of religion and philosophy and poetry. The bookshelf immediately to my right has texts about the intersection of religion, philosophy, and the natural world. That represents an ongoing investigation for me, how to reconcile humanity to a sustainable presence on this earth.
Just to be complete my library also includes shelves of fiction, a full shelf of works on Lake Superior and its context, travel, gardening, the military, American and Western history, including a good deal on the American Civil War.
I used to think religion and folklore and legend and mythology and fairy tales occupied different terrain. Art, too. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve stripped dogma from my approach to religion, the more the boundaries disappear. Of course religion is this generation’s mythology. To be studied later in the classics department of a long away in the future university. Fairy tales and folklore and legend were the work of scientists, humans seeking patterns in nature, explanations for the forces that influence, shape, and sometimes take our lives.
Perhaps my immersion, my lifelong immersion, in these fields means that I reject the Enlightenment, at least in its empiricist modality. It might. The question. How can I find knowledge and truth in physics, biology, astronomy, geology yet retain a naive faith in the possibility of something all those disciplines cannot explain?
The new atheists like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have a flat earth attitude toward wonder, mystery, delight, whimsy. In their mean and stolid world only that which can be seen, measured, replicated has meaning. They are descendants of the logical positivists and the language philosophers. Perhaps the best expression of this attitude is Wittgenstein’s famous quote: “Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.”
Whether or not he meant it that way, most thinkers who want to discard the mantel of dogma and its many obfuscations believe he meant, if it’s not empirical, we can know nothing and say nothing about it. This follows from Kant’s understanding of the ding an sich, the thing in itself. Kant believed there was a reality, he was no idealist, but he also believed that since we could only know what our senses brought us we could never know that reality itself, just the effects it had on our eyes, our hands, our ears, our nose, our taste.
There is a bald truth here. Our sensorium equips us to navigate a world delivered to us through our bodies. We can learn a lot about this world by being very careful about what we perceive. Yet at the end of theoretical physics, at the end of cosmology, at the end of life’s study of itself, at the end of consciousness, we have only an elaborate construction based on empirical data. As we know, any specific instance of that construction is often wrong, because science itself proceeds through revolutions in thought paradigms as much as it does through the empirical method.
In Celtic mythology the world of Faery, the world of pixies, faeries, goblins, the dead, and the divine is The Other World. What a world it is. I’ve recently imagined it, in my underway novel Jennie’s Dead, as a vast and open land where old gods go after their followers abandon them. Where characters of myth and legend still have adventures. Where travel between lands may take thousands of years or be finished in an instant.
What an impoverished, skinny world the new atheists and their philosophical forbearers inhabit. I prefer the company of Aladdin, of Shiva, of Lao Tze, of Herman Hesse, of Zeus and Lycaon, even of Jesus and Moses.
green knight
My sense of wonder awakens daily as I do. The Lodgepole pines out the bedroom window sway in the Wind. The Stars twinkle and shine above them in a black early morning Sky. A Mountain Lion coughs far away. In the fall the strangled call of a bugling Elk might make its way here. I’ve just come from the land of dreams, another non-empirical realm, and my Other World senses are on high alert, having spent a nighttime tuned to the flashes of neurons, the pulsing of brain cells switching on and off.
Poetry sweeps away the cobways of linear thought, carrying the reader into the realm of aha. Of, oh, I see. Of distant caverns unimaginable to man. The room of the Raven exists first in Poe’s mind, then on the page, then in ours. But how does it exist, ontologically? If you say only in ink on paper, my how little you know.
I’ve traveled Russian cart tracks holding hands with the staret of the Pilgrim. I swam the waters deeper than the Mariani’s Trench with the Megladon. I’ve walked on foreign worlds and spoken with aliens. Harry Seldon and I together pondered psychohistory. I’ve played the glass bead game, gotten into a Louisiana bar with a bottle of Trublood in my hand. The Caliph and I entertained Jinn. Huck Finn and I tossed a line in the waters of the Great Muddy.
These eternal inhabitants of the Other World are our guides. They know the ancientrails on which we humans travel and want us to use them to our utmost benefit.
You and I were a speck of ohr during the obliteration of the ayn sof. We’ve traveled together and apart for billions of years, been part of so many things, witnessed so many others. When God is repaired, we may join up again and sit with Rumi, a jug of wine at hand, blessed to be in that far off land beyond right and wrong.
Advice from María Sabina, Mexican healer and poet – “Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds. Heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking at the stars. Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. Be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead. Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier. Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember … you are the medicine.”
Sunday gratefuls: Beau Jo’s pizza. Easy Entree’s Chicago beef sandwiches. Keepin’ me sane. Kate. Somewhat better days. Trying new things with her nourishment. That crescent Moon. Sleeping through the night. Invisible City, a short Netflix series featuring Brazilian folklore. Latin American magical realism. 100 Years of Solitude. Marquez.
Folklore. Legend. Fairy tales. Mythology. Religion. Art. These are some of my favorite things.
Just finished the short series, Invisible City, on Netflix. It features Brazilian folktale creatures like the Saci, the Cuca, the Cucupira, the pink River Dolphin. Green Frontier, a Colombian series from 2017, focuses on the Amazonian forest and the supernatural.
Netflix and to a lesser extent, Amazon Prime and HBO Max, keep offering films and television series from all over the world. I love this, especially the original programming on Netflix produced by local creatives in their own language and in their own thought worlds. The supernatural dramas draw me in though they vary a great deal in quality.
I also love dramas and mysteries that show life in different places. Gomorrah, organized crime in Naples. The Alienist, turn of the century (19th to 20th) New York, Monarca, contemporary Mexico City, Wild District, contemporary life in Bogota and the lives of guerillas. Many others.
Since I can’t get out, get around, these days, travel comes to me. The anthropologist in me loves the folktales, the cultures, the different mores. And the ticket price is far lower.
Reading lately. Finished a few chess related novels after watching the amazing Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Finishing Theodora Gossa’s European Travels for Monstrous Women and will pick up Kim Stanley Robinson’s, the Ministry of the Future next. Science fiction and fantasy also live in the fairy tale, folktale, legendary realm.
Writing. Jennie’s Dead. Ancientrails. Writing a Psalm for the Rabbi Jamie class. Not as much as I’d like, more than I’ve been doing. Just bought some Brazilian folklore books. Might be good basis for a new novel.
I have another novel idea I’ve been kicking around for years, one that would examine white supremacy, maybe militias. This one emerges not from the favorite things I mentioned above, but from my growing up years in Indiana. Like my buddy Mark Odegard this work sustains me, even though it may never see the light of day.
My birthday’s coming up and I’m playing with the idea of a podcast or a Patreon website on which I would read my own novels, figure out some sort of subscription service. Not a new idea, novels were sometimes published in newspapers, magazines, in serial fashion. Combine my speaking voice with my creative voice. The birthday part of this is buying items for a podcasting studio.
Friend Alan Rubin has a lot of experience in audio recording and has created a studio for himself to do voice overs and commercials. He’s advised me. I’ve watched Youtube videos and just bought Audio for Authors, a book about this sort of project.
So, yes, the creative me stays alive, is never far from my consciousness.
The only rule is to work. From a list of rules by John Cage. That’s the trick. Persistence.
Saturday gratefuls: Good Stock. Soups. 2.0 calorie nutrients for Kate. Kate. Always, Kate. Kep, so happy for breakfast. Literally jumping up and down. Cooler weather. Sleep. Until 7 this morning. Biden says no 45 intelligence briefings. Biden pushes relief package. As is. Vaccines. Covid. Awake. Rather than woke.
Relishing the relief. No need to cringe when reading headlines. No need to jump out of my chair and hit the streets to comment publicly on a Presidential statement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Biden’s win has taken a dark bowl off my back, set it down in the basement, the deep basement, (OK, Mar-a-Lago) where it belongs. It’s not alone down there. The dark bowl of slavery is there. Of white supremacy. Of fascism and fascists. Many others.
But, don’t become complacent. That basement is our cultural shadow. These bowls are not gone. They can be drunk from again. Still. Only owning them, why they’re part of us, part of our communal life, can break the bowls and let their foul liquids seep into the bowels of hell from whence they came. We’re not ready for that yet.
Though. He who will not be named’s Presidency did do us service in that regard. Surfacing our shadow, bringing into the light. Giving it visibility. Charlottesville. January 6, a shadow epiphany. George Floyd. Drink bleach. Shine a light up your rectum. Deregulate oil and gas. Don’t read. Don’t learn. Don’t embrace or love your neighbor, instead take their kids and put them in a cage. Yes, we saw all of this. Good. It’s not gone away. It’s only resting in the deep basement of our national psyche. Below the National Archives, I imagine.
The work that comes next. That will be the hardest. Essential work and in these matters we are all essential workers.
Not now. Beat back Covid. Restore the economy. Shift to renewable energy. Reform policing. Extend a hand to those who would live in the land of the free and the brave. Breathe. Relax.
The time will come to admit that the Klan served all white people. The time will come to admit we were all addicted to oil and gas. The time will come to admit that people who are different scare all of us. The time will come to say, yes, we outsourced our fears to the police, to ICE, to militia groups, to the NRA. The time will come.
The time is now though to make critical thinking and science education a key part of every American’s education. Media literacy, a way of understanding that not all we read or see is true. These skills, their lack, has sickened us almost to the point of death. Fix them now. Now.
