Summer and the Summer Moon Above
Friday gratefuls: Mini-splits cooling. A cool night. Good sleeping. July 4th. Seoah’s birthday. Sending her a Jacquie Lawson card. Mary in Eau Claire. The most recent CJ Box book. K-dramas. Stranger. Sky Castle. Itaewon Class. Cod. Potatoes. Collard greens. Herme.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our Earth
One brief shining: Geez Tom passed on an image from JPL that showed all the asteroids that could strike the Earth and they wove in and out of the Solar system creating a web of white that looked like doom doom doom for the Planet but no JPL says not this century.
Learned another one:
I traveled to Cold Mountain,
Stayed here for thirty years.
Yesterday looked for friend and family
More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs
Slow burning, life dies like a flame,
Never resting, passing like a river.
I stand in my lone shadow,
Suddenly, the tears flow down.
Summer feels like the American season to me. The 4th of July. The Indianapolis 500. NASCAR. Baseball. Family reunions in city parks and on family farms.
For many years I would take the summer to read American history, political philosophy, political analysis. Haven’t done it for a while but recent reading about the far right was the sort of thing I would do.
I also have a modest Civil War jones. I love to visit battlefields. Again, like the summer reading, it’s been a while since I’ve set out on a road trip to visit Civil War sites. Thinking I might do it next year. Visit Sarah and Jerry, Paul and Sarah. This year’s occupied with Korea and Israel.
Let me see. I’ve been to Manassas, Antietam, Shiloh, Ft. Sumter, Stones River, Vicksburg, Ft. Donelson, and Andersonville. Still missing Gettysburg and several others. Enough for a long trip.
Guess I could also visit Trump era proto-Civil War sites like the Capitol Building and Richmond, Virginia.
With the Extremes dismantling years of liberal policy and law trying to take us back to their own future, a dismal and cruel place, learning what the far right wants has become more and more important.
They want no special treatment for African Americans. Even if the special treatment of slavery skewed not only the politics of our constitution but embedded racism in the very interstices of our law and governance. Even if the special treatment of slavery ginned up the falsest of lies, white supremacy. Even if we know all of this for sure.
They want all life held sacred. Except the children born to poor parents or the children of immigrants. Or the victims of mass incarceration who end up dying needless deaths in prisons across the U.S. I mean not only, not even primarily, capital punishment, but deaths of despair, of under treated illness, deaths of families living without fathers.
They want to be left alone in their enclaves of Christian Nationalism or survivalist paranoia or anti-globalist, America first isolation. They want to treat all Federal lands as personal property and suffer no accountability for their actions.
They want guns to protect their liberty from the fascist Federal government while supporting the actual fascists who will certainly take their liberty and impoverish them even more.
They want the libtards to stop trying. We cannot, must not. Ever. Stop.
