Sunday - nice morning for a long walk before the heat of the afternoon

I took a nice long walk this morning, again at the Kensico Dam Plaza. Considering for how many years I've been going and walking there, you would think I knew all the paths and where they went. Just goes to show you a fellow can be wrong. While taking my walks I'd see people going off in a direction that I thought would take them out of the park, but sometimes I'd see the same person again during my walk. Today I decided to check out where that path led. I was suspicious it was an alternate route to the road on the top of the dam and I was right. Unlike the steep, narrow stairs on either side of the dam, near it's base, this was a sweeping red brick road that curved along under a canopy of trees and ended at the top of the dam just a little east of the roadblock. Two things about it: no stairs so bikes can use it and it's broad enough that maintaining a space between walkers is very easy. I think I will use it when I go up.

There was only one exercise class this morning when I was taking my walk but there were runners and joggers, cyclists, people walking their dogs, and people just happy to be somewhere there were other people, without having to put their health at risk.

I chatted with a few. There was a group of four women celebrating a birthday, another quartet of women making a video to put on Tik-Tok, a motorcyclist chilling on a bench, and other small groups - usually not more than four - walking or chatting. Social distancing was mostly being maintained. People up here are mostly being smart. The lesson of the Chappaqua teens and their parents has been taken to heart: be careless and you can either become  ill or become a vector for the virus.

I've been mulling over my emotional response to the Doofus Donald. He is a hater and it's causing me to feel more odium than I'd like. In truth I would like to stay cooly rational about him and about what his administration is about, and sometimes I do. But when I read his speeches, or I look at that face with his smarmy, I'm the president and I can do whatever I want- look, I feel the bile rising. I read a comment this morning by someone who was looking back at what the sTrump'et said after the killing in Charlottesville VA, when the fascists and neo-nazis planned on rioting against the peaceful anti-racism demonstration, and a woman was run down by a murderous White supremacist neo-klansman. "there are good people on both sides." The s'Trump'et was signaling his approval of the violence, and the racist, xenophobic, America is for White Christian rioters. The commentator said he did not know if sTrump'et is a racist or an  Anti-Semite, but that he is good for them and enables them.

Right now, the a-hole-in-chief is only playing to his so-called base, really, people with the most base attitudes toward pluralism, democracy and a society that is open to many types of growth. For them, only their grievances, their hate and their insolent my way or the highway attitude is reinforced by sTrump'et. We have to go out and make sure that those who are undecided decide to vote against the s'Trumpet. We have to go out and find the ways to make those who have doubts but lean Republican see that voting for the sTrump'et is voting against their own short- and long-term interests. We can do this, and as Summer winds toward Fall, I'll be doing what I can and I hope all people of good will act honestly, and at the end of the day, can look themselves in the eye and know they helped save America from it's own worst instincts. 

The photos I chose today are of the women making their video and of a cyclist on the dam. They all wanted me to photograph them. The cyclist, riding back past me shouted for me to photograph him. Graciella, the woman in orange, told me they were following me so I'd take a few more pix.

It was fun. People can make me feel good.

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