It’s evening, dark has descended upon the countryside on this, the first day of spring, which was fairly spring like here in Columbia County, with the temperatures scraping fifty degrees.
As I drove around, folks were out, working on repairing their mailboxes on the side of the roads, knocked over by the snow plows. Since there is no mail delivery on Patroon Street, that was not my worry.
It was a good day. Woke early, read news and emails, showered, had a conference call about a PBS project I’m working on and then went down to the radio station for a meeting. From there, I went down to the little café across from the train station and had a bowl of amazing New England Clam Chowder.
Followed by more errands, a visit with my friend Debbie, who is recovering from surgery, and at the end of the day, I was in Hudson and went to the Red Dot for a creamy tomato soup with crab [OMG!] followed by a chicken breast sautéed to perfection, then home, putting away all the things I’d purchased, mostly cleaning supplies that had gone low.
Now I am here, at the laptop, jazz plays on Echo, and I am delightfully cozy in the cottage. Hygge.
It’s what’s needed. Sitting with Patrick O’Connor at the Red Dot, I told him I often look at the Food Section of the New York Times before I review the news. Before plunging into the reality of the world, I feel a need for something comforting, like a new recipe.
And, today, the first day of spring, you needed a good recipe to ease you into a day that has been – interesting, to say the least.
At ten o’clock, as I was having my conference call with WTTW, the PBS affiliate in Chicago, James Comey, head of the FBI, began giving testimony in front of House Intelligence Committee. While I was having a conference call with WTTW in Chicago, myself in New York and my producer in New Delhi, my text message screen was alight with people asking me if I was watching?
No, I was on a conference call. And when I finished, I had meetings to go to. And my email was full of news updates through the day while I was running errands.
Comey acknowledged that the FBI was investigating links between Trump’s campaign and Russia. There is no information they have that corroborates President Trump’s tweets that the Obama administration “wiretapped” Trump Tower. Nor does the Justice Department.
While all this was going on, @POTUS, the official Twitter account of the President, was putting a good spin on the testimony.
You know, I’ve seen an awful lot in my life and I’ve never seen anything like this. Well, maybe Watergate.
And then there’s Uber, an app driven ride service I have frequently used, until recently. After only seven months, its president quit as the company’s values were inconsistent with his own. OUCH!
Uber is under great duress as it faces sexual harassment suits and a slew of other ugly issues. I’m using Lyft now; most of their drivers also drive for Uber and prefer Lyft calls.
Riding in an Uber is painful as most of their drivers just complain about how awful they are while Lyft drivers mostly say how good the company is. Lyft uber alles!
Norway is the happiest country in the world. What do we have to learn from them? Or is just about North Sea oil? No, that’s facetious. The Scandinavians work at being happy, they work at social harmony. Norway may be happiest and it’s closely followed by Demark and Sweden.
The U.S. has slipped to 14th and I’ll be interested to see where we are next year.
Ladies and gentleman, this is a remarkable time in our democracy. Pay attention. Don’t be partisan. Just pay attention.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack via the train… March 27, 2017 The future we can almost touch…
March 28, 2017It is nearing sunset; I am riding north after a day in the city, on the 5:47 out of New York Penn. Todd, one of our most venerable conductors, is conducting a game of trivia in which all of us who ride in the café car are participating. It is lovingly raucous. Some are answering the question before Todd finishes asking the question.
The commute, I don’t miss. The people I do. There is a mixture tonight of old regulars and new regulars. Annette, of Rhinebeck, is screaming answers and folks are singing the songs which are the answers to some of the questions. It is a moment wrapped in warmth.
The sun slips beneath the Catskills in a glow of burnt orange. With Trivia Time now over, we have slipped back to reading, working, with more than a few yawns stretching faces wide.
As in every day there seems to be a necessary amount of political conversations. Our google groups email list for the Empire Regulars, got slightly sidetracked into politics today until Maria, our estimable moderator, stepped in and held up the stop sign. As always, when Maria decrees, the Regulars accede.
While I am far from politically indifferent, the cascade of commentary is wearing. This is going to be a long, long haul and we must husband our strength over time and be laser focused.
Just before I boarded the train, Andrew Mer, a fellow consultant and I had a brief meeting while we discussed the Miller Center a bit and some other things. He said something I thought wise. Trump’s election has laid bare the fissures in our society we have papered over.
And Mr. Trump is helping underscore the fissures.
The attempt to repeal and replace has gone down in flames and there is even a tentative reaching out to Democrats to see what actually be done as the Freedom Caucus is intransient.
California farmers, enthusiastic supporters of Trump, are nonplussed at his immigration intentions. One said: I thought Trump was kidding. He is now anxious because his farm in California runs because of illegal immigrants.
The agony of Rockford, Illinois and other rust belt cities is now at the surface and the failure to deal with that, under both Democrats and Republicans, is a national shame, building for generations. We did not retrain people for other jobs to replace the ones not returning.
And the jobs are not returning until we look at and adapt to the revolution technology is shoving down our throats and figure out what else we can do.
The industrial revolution is coming to an end; whatever history calls this one, we need to find a new way.
The coal jobs in West Virginia probably aren’t coming back. Machines are mining what men once did. Driverless cars will toss aside the long-distance drivers, once a way to climb an economic rung. Not today, not tomorrow but someday, in a future we can almost touch, those jobs will disappear and we are not moving to educate all those people for something different.
The Trump Revolution is not dissimilar to what happened as the Industrial Revolution began the change. People rioted. Today they voted. If we don’t address the systemic issues, the next step will be riots.
The hopeful part is we somehow weathered the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and accomplished incredible things. In the last hundred years, for those in the west, our life spans have doubled, we are more educated, our lives are quite fantastic compared to that of our grandparents. There are friends of mine who are alive because of what has been achieved.
And we need to focus on the fact we are in a revolutionary period. Trump isn’t looking there nor was Hillary Clinton. Our politicians on both sides are facing the past, not the future.
The brilliance of Kennedy was he painted a picture of what could be, not what was.
We have raised the lid on the septic tank and need to clean it now.
What we are achieving technologically in this time has the promise of catapulting us to another level and very few seem to realize it and fewer still imagine how to use it for the common good.
Tags: Andrew Mer, Catskills, Donald Trump, Driverless cars, Industrial Revolution, JFK, John Kennedy, Miller Center, Paul Ryan, Repeal and Replace, Rhinebeck, technology, West Virginia
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