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.