what's in a word?: Monday - Dealing with the first hot and muggy day of summer

Monday, June 22, 2020

Monday - Dealing with the first hot and muggy day of summer

The solstice has barely passed and finally it feels like summer - it could be a day in July. I tolerate this weather pretty well. In my younger years I worked in the stacks of the New York Public Library before it was air-conditioned, and in the basement of the Strand when it was an oven in the summer months. I learned to deal with it, even if it was uncomfortable.

My house, more than two hundred years old, was not designed for central air, so we have window units. Most summers since the kids grew up we only put one in the family room but this year I also put one in the guest room since we've been using it more. That one was on today, and it provided respite for anyone who felt overheated.

I like my old farmhouse, and when it's time for me to sell and move somewhere else, probably some place without stairs, I'll feel a bit sad.

I've been thinking long and hard about the racial divide in the USA. A few years ago I read a strongly researched and well written book titled "Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites" by the social historian Wayne Flynt (University of Alabama Press, 1989) and some of the things he described stayed with me. He pointed out how among poor working and farming folk in Alabama, Blacks and Whites were natural allies driven apart by a persistent propaganda effort by empowered property classes, mostly White, who owned the mills, the mines, the factories and forges where people might have an opportunity to build a class unity that could stand up to the owners, but instead were driven apart by a strong and constant drumbeat calling on the poor Whites to fear their Black neighbors.

This was not limited to Alabama, and the racism that became embedded in everything, poisoned relationships between people and consigned people of color to second class citizenship. That any could emerge from the centuries of systematic disempowerment, with a constant message of inferiority, and be strong and successful is a testament to human ability to transcend.

And here we are at the beginning of summer, 2020, finally, standing up to the worst elements of our society, slowly recognizing that this is not a conservative/liberal issue, this is humanity, and pushing back against the haters, the White Supremacists, the Nazis, the Kluxers who demonstrate their own personal insecurities in their fear of the other. We may not be able to change their hearts but if we can teach them to just shut up and act civil, we will have made progress.

It doesn't help that Dingleberry Donald, the sTrump'et A-hole-in-chief is doing all he can to enable the racists, make them feel proud of their bigotry, in hopes that there are enough of them to give him a second term.

We need to show them and him, and all those enablers of hatred around him, that we are sick and tired of it and we won't take it any more.

Unelect sTrump'et, unelect the fascist right in Senate, so never have to look at ass-faces like Cruz again.

Meanwhile, I take pictures.

Tonight I'm posting some of the worst photos I've taken in some time, but I like them. I need to get a faster focusing lens because that was where I failed: I couldn't keep these guys, Chip and Dale or Mac 'n' Tosh in focus while they scampered and played with each other near the base of the Kensico Dam. Buying a lens with a faster auto-focus will go on my shopping list.