Robin and I set a personal record by attending two political rallies only one day apart. On Thursday we drove to Grand Junction to march in their May 1 observation. On Friday we attended a smaller demonstration here on Montrose. Both of these focused on the harm to working families brought about by the present government.
We’re excited about the continuation of the protests around the country. They continue to grow in number and in size, and it should come as no surprise that this is happening. Every day the haphazardness of our federal government supplies fuel for the fire in the breast and the anger in the heart.
I’ve had good people ask questions as to why get involved in demonstrations? Each time it reminds me of the (perhaps apocryphal) conversation between Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau had been arrested and jailed for not paying a poll tax which he regarded as unjust. His refusal was an act of civil disobedience. When Emerson came to visit his friend in the hoosegow he asked “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau’s classic answer was “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”
While my natural bent is to sit in the shade in a comfortable chair with an iced coffee near at hand, today’s realities have forced me to do something quite different. I am very clear as to why I am taking to the streets with many other good people. Firstly, I have seen such demonstrations work … twice … in my lifetime. The long hard protest for civil rights was one of those times, and the other was the fight against the war in Viet Nam.
Secondly, I know that everything Cluck and his adherents are doing has been done by every totalitarian government trying to take power. There are no mysteries here. It is the same playbook over and over again.
Our present Congress is has proved itself too weak an instrument to resist these machinations. Our Supreme Court is too compromised to be counted on. If there is anything that can stop the present march to non-democracy, it is the people themselves. People who see the inequities, the injustices, and the corruption for what they are. And who then step forward in numbers great enough to show those we hired to do this work how it should be done.
One person doesn’t count at all, really. But millions of people will get the attention of our elected representatives and they will finally find the courage to do the right thing. Perhaps grudgingly, but they will do it. It has happened before and it will happen again.
So I am one of the millions now and the millions more to be. No more and no less. A speck. One cell of a body that is gaining strength every day.
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From The New Yorker
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Recently Rachel Maddow had this to say:
So if suiting up and showing up helps our country in any small way to get out of the unholy mess that the Cluck gang is deliberately creating, I will do so with alarming frequency and ridiculous fervor.
Perhaps I should carry a sheaf of signed waivers to hand out to rally organizers absolving them of any responsibility should my particular cosmic and eternal number come up during a demonstration.
(I know that croaking on a march with my sign in my hand would be bad form and a definite downer, and promise to do what I can to avoid making such a scene.)
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Supper Thursday in Grand Junction was at one of our favorite restaurants, Namaste. It’s a small place in a strip mall on the southern edge of town. Our waiter was the most upbeat and chatty guy, almost as if he was an emcee and we were an audience of two. Snippets of his monologue would be:
When I was a little boy in Nepal, we had kings and queens. When the queen got an automobile for the first time, bearers carried the car with her in it.
I came to this country when I was eight years old, and I thought I was just moving to another state in Nepal. Then I got off the transport and there were all these people with light hair and blue eyes. I had never noticed the difference in the eyes before.
All in all, delightful. Good food and a memory tour of Nepal.
For most of my life whenever I played the game “If you were marooned on a desert isle and could eat only one cuisine for the rest of your life what would it be?” I chose Italian. But at some point a few years back, that choice became Indian, and still is. I love the respect that they have for vegetables.
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From The New Yorker
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There are a lot of colorful characters to be met at AA meetings. We are definitely a motley bunch. Early on in sobriety I met a man named Jim at a meeting who was about 7 degrees off to port most of the time, but while this exasperated some of the other attendees I found him interesting, and we became friends. He introduced me to Krishna Das and kirtan music.
Krishna Das started out in music as a rock musician, and he was part of a group that eventually became Blue Oyster Cult, but this was before it had taken on that name.
However, he met Ram Dass along the way and his life’s trajectory was definitely altered. After than it was off to India to study, and learning the use of music as a form of meditation. It doesn’t take a hard listen, though, to hear rock and roll underpinning his stuff here and there.
Check out this one, taken from a concert in New York City, see what I mean. He’s one of the good guys.
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Yesterday as I was cruising the streets of Paradise NPR was playing and a woman whose name I never learned was describing the epiphany that being able to make one’s own mixtapes truly was. To be able to make a tape recording containing only the tunes I wanted to hear in the order I wanted to hear them was so liberating it was not to be believed.
Just spending time with this advance in technology I believe cumulatively used up enough minutes to make up about four of the years I have spent on the planet. And then along came the double tape deck machine that allowed me to make duplicates of a cassette to distribute to friends and random people I met along the way … my oh my oh my. I never thought of it as a hobby based on theft, but it was of course, as soon as I made the first copy not for my own use. Up until then the music belonged to me and I could, by God, do with it whatever I wanted was my thought line.
Late at night I would get lost in the process of creation, finally looking up at a clock and realizing that I’d better quit and go to bed or I would be going directly from the tape deck to work. And I was a thirty year-old married guy with four kids and a day job … the mind shudders at trying to imagine what would have happened to me without these anchors to reality.
Anyway, who would have thought that listening to NPR could be dangerous to one’s peace of mind? Maybe I shouldn’t be driving when I do it?
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Apropos of the above rant, here is a glimpse of how it was … from the movie High Fidelity. The original one. (Warning: lots of naughty words here)
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Little Home In The Valley 