Today, earlier, as I sat sipping morning coffee, two huge geese came crashing through a tree fallen across the creek, landing hard, splashing as they hit creek water. It was startling. Geese, once so abundant on my creek, have been rare these last few years. Mature birds these, I wondered if they were from one of the many families of geese I have seen growing up while I have resided at the cottage, come home to roost for a moment. Sailing majestically up and down for a time, they departed and I’ve not seen them again.
Irma has become a Category 5 Hurricane and will reach Saba tonight, the Caribbean island I visited earlier this year. Two friends from my Los Angeles days have retired there and will be facing her fury as I write this. For a while, I got lost on Facebook to see if they had posted anything new but they hadn’t. It’s now that time when you get on your knees and pray, which I will tonight and have not done since my very Catholic days and that was a long while ago. And I am worried for them because Irma is as fiercer than Harvey.
Hopefully, I will know tomorrow more than I know tonight. Tonight, they are battening down the hatches and waiting, hoping, maybe praying though I don’t think either of them are religious. There have been posts from people I met there. They will be in my prayers, too.
Tonight, across the country, “Dreamers” are praying because Jeff Sessions announced the end of Obama’s DACA order and Congress has six months to fix it or all those “dreamers” will begin to be deported.
Color me cynical. How cruel can this Administration be? Trump is playing to his base but not to the interests of the country. Color me angry and not surprised. So little surprises me anymore. And there are all kinds of folks who think this is just wonderful.
And that scares me and makes me hopeful because all the rage in America is boiling to surface and maybe we will finally deal with it. It would be good if we did because we are in a very delicate place.
Back in the day, long, long ago, I was in Canada to be in my roommate’s wedding to a Canadian woman and, as I was preparing to leave, a group of my Canadian friends did an “intervention.” They did not want me to leave. Viet Nam was in play. They wanted me to stay, become a Canadian.
I didn’t. Because I was an American. It was a very profound moment in my life, making the decision to return. Those were people I loved, who loved me and I might have been happy there – a completely different life but not unhappy.
But I am an American and so I returned, got lucky, didn’t go to Viet Nam, didn’t serve in the military and made my life here.
But here is not the here I know. This here seems very strange to me, like the clock has been turned back and I don’t get it. Something is afoot and we need to fix it, once and for all. Maybe electing Trump will be the catalyst to fixing the festering wound that has damaged our national soul.
Tags: DACA, Dreamers, Hurricane Irma, Jeff Sessions, Saba, Trump
Letter from the Vineyard 
September 6, 2017 at 10:23 pm |
Prayers for Saba and all the Caribbean Islands being impacted by Hurricane Irma and also for South Florida, the keys and anywhere else this monster storm may land.
I feel like you that this is not the country I know. Like it is some foreign place. Even during the Viet Nam War when feelings were strong, divided and boiling this was still America. Now I am not so sure. Now I am worried that the principles millions, my Dad among them fought to protect and the “social safety net” put in place since are being destroyed from the inside out. The poem on the Statue of Liberty’s base is still there. Lady Liberty still stands in New York Harbor but are the words and the sentiments behind them still valid here? In my heart I know I and many who feel the way I do are appalled at the repeal of DACA, the grotesque shenanigans going on in the DT administration that is trying to fill every agency with those who previously had opposed that agency or lobbied against the agency. Then on the other hand filling positions with those completely unqualified having no experience or no knowledge of what needs to be done to run the agency. That is scary but to think that this is a plan, the plan to dismantle our democracy is chilling. I am sorry to sound a bit morbid but we need to remember that DT’s strategist and many of this administration’s advisors and supporters are Alt-right, KKK, Neo-Nazis or White Supremacists. That seems to be the path DT is following or being led down,
September 7, 2017 at 1:31 pm |
Or the path DT is choosing…