This is one of the most enjoyable moments I have in a week, sitting at the dining room table, jazz playing in the background, the sun setting, looking across the deck to the wild woods across the creek, pulling together my thoughts as the sun slowly sets.
This morning I re-read my last online post [www.mathewtombers.com]. In the last part I wrote about Islam and the West having to come to terms with each other and as I read it I thought: whoa, Islam must come to peace with itself. IS is mostly killing other Muslims. Those numbers dwarf the numbers they have killed in Paris and Brussels and New York and London. They die by the hundreds and thousands in Iraq and Syria alone. Not to mention Yemen, which seems to be to Sunni and Shia what Spain was to Fascists and Republicans in the 1930’s.
We note with great care and deep exegesis the murders in the West and the daily drumbeat of death in Baghdad, Aleppo and Yemen is a footnote. Muslims are mostly slaughtering other Muslims.
Not unlike the way Christians slaughtered other Christians in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. We had the Thirty Year War, which started as a religious war and became so much more. The Muslims seem to be having their Thirty Year War and it is much scarier because technology is so much more advanced.
And while they fight amongst themselves, some of them rage against the West, those who are Fundamentalist Muslims. They see us as abominations.
One late night here at the cottage I wondered if I was living a bit like a Roman in the 2nd or 3rd Century CE, knowing the darkness was coming and unable to prevent it so enjoying the present as much as possible.
That’s a bit melodramatic I suppose. Events are still playing out. Outcomes can be changed.
The forces at work in our lives are terrifying. We have a saber rattling Putin, who denies everything negative, and a major religion that is going through an existential crisis, manyßåå of them thinking nothing of killing as a policy.
In college, I took an Honors course on Medieval Islamic Civilization and they were civilized. Something has gone very wrong there and, hopefully, for all of us, they will sort it out.
In the meantime, the rest of the world keeps moving.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month.
Not being mentally healthy is a debilitating stigma many carry. As someone who has been in therapy since he was sixteen, I empathize. It is not, in many places, åstill, now, acceptable to talk about.
And it saved my life. And in the years between then and now, many members of my family have taken me aside to thank me for having broken the dam. I was the first and I was pretty loud about it too. Everyone knew. Everyone rolled their eyes at me, then they began quietly to look for their own therapists.
We are still dealing with racial issues and we are still dealing with mental stigmas. So good there is a Mental Health Awareness Month. We need all the mental health we can get.
Our politics continue to look like a sideshow. Friends who live in Japan, Australia, Europe ask me what is going on? I don’t know. Does anyone? There has been nothing like this in my lifetime and it is a bit scary.
I have been reading articles about the raucous Nevada Democratic Convention and I haven’t parsed the events quite but there was a showdown between the Bernie supporters and the Hillary supporters. Hillary won but her supporters are worried about a similar scene playing out at the national convention.
It has grown dark now. The sun has set. While it is mid-May, the temperature is going down to 34 tonight so we are not actually in real Spring yet. I had to turn up the heat tonight. I might yet light a fire.
The jazz lures me to a quiet place of introspection.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 04 21 2017 The past fights the future…
April 21, 2017Apple blossoms dressed the trees in the orchards as I drove along 9H earlier today, the first, best sign of spring I’ve seen though, once having noticed them, I was aware that small buds of green were appearing on other trees. The ones outside my windows don’t seem to be sporting them and I’m sure they will come eventually, which is how this spring has seemed – eventually we will get there – just not yet.
It has been a quiet sort of day. Earlier I spent some time at OMI, an art center near me that I have known about but had not visited and that was my loss. The two-hundred-acre campus is dotted with sculptures, the main building with art exhibits. Today quite beautiful children were painting, running around in young life’s exuberance, bringing smiles to all the adults. I offered up a thought for good lives for them; the future does feel cloudy right now.
It’s not just that this is a gray day. Generally, I am an upbeat sort of person [or at least I think of myself as that] and today I’ve not been. The state of the world has been weighing on me, both close to home and far from here.
Close to home, I am burdened because a friend sent me suicidal texts and I was incredibly concerned and finally asked the police to do a “welfare check.” They did. He then texted me he wanted nothing more to do with me. Truthfully, I did the right thing and, at this moment, it hasn’t turned out well. For me and, I expect, not for him as he is in deep trouble and won’t admit it.
Candles to be lit; prayers to be said and to continue, as best we can.
Paris is continuing as best it can after a policeman was shot yesterday and two badly wounded by a terrorist who was killed as he was fleeing. IS claims responsibility and France is having elections on Sunday. The far-right candidate, Marie Le Pen, is threatening to remove France from the EU so that it can control its own borders.
She has a chance of winning.
The far right is making its might felt all over the place.
And that is so worrying to me.
For a brief, shining moment in my life it seemed we might actually be headed toward a global society and it has not happened. It was around the time the Berlin Wall went down, a moment I will forever remember. Driving down Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, headed west, my bestest friend, Tory Abel, called me on my car phone and said: do you know what’s going on? As I was listening to classical music, I didn’t. The wall was falling.
There are all kinds of suppositions about why that magic moment did not result in a better world.
Right now, I am reading a book about “the weekend” in British homes in the 1930’s and one of the revelatory bits was about a British Lord who became a Muslim because he saw Islam as the bulwark against women getting the vote and having shorter skirts and working.
He would probably have a lot in common with IS.
Change is hard. And changing centuries of tradition is hard and people will fight it. IS is fighting it.
When all of this works itself out, I won’t be here. It will take more than a lifetime.
And that is history in the making. It takes lifetimes to work itself out.
If you are not aware of it, Chechnya is conducting a campaign against gays. It is putting us in camps, not unlike the Nazis; there are tales of torture and death. Can this be happening in the 21st Century? Apparently so. The reports are horrific.
The President of Chechnya has declared he will eliminate the gay community by the beginning of Ramadan on May 26th.
Putin has declared there is no evidence this is happening and that is Putin’s view of the world: no horrible thing is happening. There is no sarin gas is Syria, there is no campaign against gays in Chechnya, there is no fill in the blank.
Tags:Chechnya, Chechnya campaign against gays, Far right, Los Angeles, Marie Le Pen, Nazis, OMI, Paris, Putin, Syria, technology, Tory Abel
Posted in 2016 Election, Brexit, Civil Rights, Claverack, Columbia County, Education, Elections, Entertainment, European Refugee Crisis, Gay, Gay Liberation, Greene County New York, Hudson New York, IS, Life, Literature, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Matthew Tombers, Media, Mideast, Nazis, Paris Attacks, Paris Killings, Political, Political Commentary, Politics, Putin, Russia, Social Commentary, Television, Trump, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »