Summer and the Moon of Sorrow
Saturday gratefuls: Watermelon. Tomatoes. Bacon. Sourdough bread. Water. Coffee. Eggs. Hardboiling Eggs in a steamer. Natural Gas. Rain. Thunder. Lightning. Lodgepole Pines. Aspen. Yes, even the Pollen. Wind. The Sun. The Moon of Sorrow. The Coronavirus. The World Ocean. Lake Superior. Minnesota Lakes. The majestic White Pine. The Wolf. The Sled Dog. This Air I breathe.
Stump grinder guy coming on Monday for an estimate. Will James coming by next week, too, for an estimate on felling the Trees too close to our house. Derek’s removing logs. I’m going to mow the back today. Cut the fuel, the fines, so a Fire won’t jump from the Grass to the lower branches of a Pine. Slowly getting the yard work underway. Fire mitigation continues.
Another tack. Many compare this multi-crisis time with the Spanish Flu era. An obvious choice, given the Plagues. I realized the other day that another era with a similar feel was the ’60s. Remember? Civil rights. Martin Luther King. Riots. Malcolm. The Vietnam war killing Americans and Vietnamese. The anti-war movement. Feminism, a bit later. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
There was then, too, an overarching cultural sense that things were about to change. In a big way. Powerful forces led by college age kids roiled the country. Many fled the cities back to the Land. Many kept the protests moving. The establishment rocked on its heels. A small nation taught us a big lesson in humility.
I remember a moment, somewhere in the early ’70s, when we thought it was possible Minnesota could lead a radical political wave. Guaranteed work. Health care for everybody. Affordable housing available to those who needed it. An education system tuned to everybody’s needs. A mini-Norway. A Northern Way instead of the third way.
Real, lasting change felt within our grasp.
Then, the pushback. Kent State. Ronald Reagan. Boomers lives tending toward married with children, quiet streets. Except in those neighborhoods where the occupiers continued to put their boots on necks.
Flash forward 50 years. I have that feeling again, the possibility of radical change. Change policing. Surely health care for all will rise up from the ashes of lives burned away by the Coronavirus. The web of systemic racism: housing policies, discrimination in hiring, microaggressions, voting rights interference, murder by authorities, four hundred years of oppression might break.
Powerful energy pulses in the streets right now, feeding the fight. Political and corporate actors need to face forward, listen. Act.
This is just a note of reminder that pushback will come. Is already underway. It’s not bad, it’s a message that the work is succeeding. Rabbi Tarfon said: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”