Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness
Shabbat gratefuls: Yet more Snow. Election week. At least it’s over. Tara. Weariness. San Francisco. St. Francis. Authenticity. Rabbi Jamie. Avram and Sarai. I am content with who I am. I am content with what I have. Mezuzahs. The Winter of our discontents.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The quiet after a big Snow
Kavannah for election week: contentment and joy
One brief shining: While talking to Tara on zoom, a knock on the front door, Vince carrying a King Sooper’s bag with milk and English muffins, two friends seeing me, helping me; the very thing I believe we need to nurture right now, holding each other close, bearing each other’s burdens.
Not going to go scree here. Yet I can’t help this much. Story header in the NYT: the Elites Had It Coming. Yeah? Showing up the elites by putting U.S. oligarchs like Trump and Musk and Adelson and Thiel in charge of dismantling the barriers between themselves and yet more rapaciousness? A burlesque. A 1920’s black and white dark comedy.
Marilyn recommended An Unfinished Love Story: A personal history of the 1960’s. Started reading on Sunday or Monday. Almost done. I graduated from Alexandria-Monroe High School in 1965. After the Civil Rights movement was well underway and as Vietnam began to grow like a cancer, killing my friends and our “foes” alike.
The 60’s were my decade of becoming a man. It was a bumpy ride. I was in it from a less lofty perch than Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns, both of whom worked closely with Lyndon Johnson, LBJ. Goodwin as a speech writer and Kearns as a Whitehouse Fellow who wrote her first, well-received work on LBJ, in 1976.
Sixty years ago. 1965. Almost. 65 years ago, 1960. The sad irony of reading about the dreams of the Kennedy years and their realization under LBJ in the Great Society legislation, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. The sad, sad irony of reading about that era as their inversion gained power, not by a coup, not by cheating at the election booth, but by the will of 74,264,010 of our fellow citizens.
On every page I turned I found fellow feeling with the aims and intents of the actors, JFK, LBJ, MLK, Bobby Kennedy, John Lewis, the Freedom Riders, the anti-war protesters of whom I was one. Sure there were disagreements as to emphasis, tactics, but what shines from these pages is a belief that government has a distinctive and necessary role in redressing wrongs, ones like entrenched racism, ones like stopping an ill-advised war. Ones like rebuilding America’s inner cities, cleaning its water and air of pollutants, giving national recognition to American art and artists.
Sixty, sixty-five years ago. In my decade of high school and college, of growing up from a small-town boy to a man committed to those same ideals. Ideals learned from the politics of that time. And now. This Tuesday last. A shocking repudiation of all of them as white supremacists and misogynists and felons and nativists plan to use the same government for their unjust and bigoted policies.
Hard to fathom. That I’ve lived through this transition and may not live to see it die away.
