My Friends, this is being published a little later than usual today, and here’s the reason. This Sunday morning I am in the Neurological ICU at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, where I was brought last evening because I was having a stroke. The excellent med staff here gave me something miraculous and as far as I can tell, all of the stroke’s effects vanished in a minute. I will go on forever about it in Tuesday’s post, but just to let you know that I am fine, and probably going home tomorrow. Life is good, and although I continue to have all my bad habits, alas, I cannot play the piano.
(Of course, I could not play the piano before this happened, either.)
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It’s hard, really, to see much positive coming out of the Cluck years. You could describe them basically as a period where our country’s worst instincts, impulses, and ideas came to the fore. With his Imperial Orangeness as the cheerleader-in-chief. And you’d be right.
But he may have accidentally done this America of ours some favors, if we can survive them. We can’t blame him for creating the large body of ugliness that is racism, for instance, he’s just one part of the whole stinking mess. But without meaning to he has shown us how extensive it is, and how widely held those beliefs are. That’s a potentially good thing. It all depends on what we do with the knowledge. (BTW, when I say “us” I mean, of course, white people. Black people already knew)
And it’s not just the MAGA wackos I’m talking about. It’s Americans like me who were willing to let things be because it didn’t directly touch us. It wasn’t our houses that were burning and our children being killed.
We could turn from the front page of the newspaper to the comic section and so avoid truly dealing with the grim news that came to us day after month after year. We could send off a few bucks to the ACLU or the NAACP and get that righteous feeling that comes from performing a small good work. We could go to our clubs and organizations and come away believing that our chatter meant we were actually doing something about the injustices that we knew existed.
But we never got our hands dirty. Marching and waving a banner that said things like We Are Not Free As Long As One Man Is In Chains looked and sounded so good that it allowed us to think we had done our share in the struggle. But it was all so safe. So risk-free.
Now (and again, I speak only for myself and those like me) we johnny-come-latelys have a chance to help and must take it. By helping to rip out any rugs that can be used to sweep these horrors and unfairnesses under. By talking, by writing, by getting dirt and perhaps some blood under our fingernails as we join those who have never stopped working at these problems. As we become fully our own small part of the solution.
Think for a moment how glorious an America would be where there was true equality. No second-class citizens. Where we were finally one people where each member experienced the same degree of “liberty and justice.” We can get there, but not by going back to what was. I may not live to see this beautiful thing , but my children might. And my grandchildren will.
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From The New Yorker
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Fighting the Good Fight Department
- At His Core, Trump Is An Immoralist by David Brooks
- Get Well, Mr. President by the NYTimes Editorial Board
- Lincoln Has Another Lesson For Trump by Roger Cohen
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This morning my cats decided to play Let’s Kill Jon. It’s been the longest time since they’ve done this, so I was caught completely unawares, and they almost succeeded. They did it as a sort of tag team.
For those of you who don’t live with cats, it goes like this. You waken in the dark, perhaps because a cat is yowling in your ear or butting you with its head or is employing any one of the many tricks these creatures can use to get you up. You begin to walk toward the bedroom door when an invisible cat in front of you suddenly stops. You sense this as your right foot is swinging forward and encounters fur. At that point you try to do something that the laws of physics won’t allow, and that is to stop completely with only one foot on the floor while your body is out there ahead of it.
So you grab the door frame to halt what would certainly have been a fatal crash, and get another foot down. Then the second cat runs across your path just as you raise your left foot, and you repeat the performance, this time using a chair back in the living room. Repeat again and again , until you can find a light switch.
Next you turn the light on and confront your adversaries, both of whom have adopted “Who, me?” looks by now and are the very picture of innocence. But there is a tiny sound that you can only barely hear, and without being able to identify it 100%, you come to the conclusion that it is kitties chortling under their breath.
It’s a sometimes fractious friendship, this relationship between man and beast.
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Little Home In The Valley 