Letter From Claverack, written on 3/29/17 Some things are harder than others…

There is sometimes nothing in the world quite like a vodka soaked olive and so when I made myself a martini tonight, I used olives instead of the traditional lemon twist.

To be truthful, I wasn’t sure I was going to put my fingers to the keyboard tonight.  It’s been a cranky day; out early in a chill drizzle doing unpleasant errands, I got home around ten this morning and determined I was not leaving the comfort of the cottage.  The fourth straight day of cold grey drizzle had me crying for mercy.

It’s been an emotional couple of days.  First, most importantly, young Nick, who helps me is going through a rough patch again and that weighs heavily on me.  Which is why I was up early today, to give him support in a rough moment.

As some of you know, I was one of the founders of Blue DOT Indivisible Hudson, a group intended to be politically active in this most distressing of political times.  On Monday evening, using a word much used in Washington these days, I “recused” myself from anything more to do with Blue DOT and that was hard, even harder than I had expected it to be.

It was difficult to discover that there was no room for me there and seeing no way there would be, I bowed out.  Of the original five, two of us are now gone, one wavering.  To say I wish them well is an understatement.  And I had to leave.

There are other things I can do, have been doing and will continue to do.

Thus, it has been an emotionally charged couple of days.

That all said, I am at the cottage, the day is closing, jazz is playing, it warm and hygge in the cottage.  Saturday will see another dinner party here and I am snuggling into figuring it out.

There were two good calls for the Miller Center for the Presidency today, both exciting in their own way.

The creek is very high because of the rain and it flows swiftly toward the pond now, abandoning for a moment its usual gentle course.

And like the creek today, nothing is gentle.

The Senate Intel Committee is about to launch hearings and is promising to be more aggressive than the House Intel Committee, led by Devin Nunes, who has found himself with his underwear wrapped in knots.

He has muddied the waters with his meeting with some source on the White House grounds that informed him that Trump and his team may have been incidentally listened in on by government agencies.  Which lead to Trump feeling “somewhat vindicated” about his, to date, unproven charge that Obama ordered “wiretapping” on Trump Tower.

Truthfully, I have trouble unwinding what the hell is going on.  And I’m not the only one.

So, the ball has been moved to the Senate where both the Republican and Democratic leaders of the committee want to know what went on.  Those Senators, Republican and Democratic, are talking about this as the biggest thing since Watergate.

And while all of this is going on, the world is facing the greatest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II.

Millions are starving and we are not paying attention because, basically, we don’t know.  The Trump Show is consuming the headlines.  South Sudan is a catastrophe.  Syria is a catastrophe. Yemen is more than a catastrophe.

Should I, a man who has no real obligations, go to one of those desperate places and offer help?  I am thinking about it.

 

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s


%d bloggers like this: