It 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.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 08 08 2017 Thoughts from a moving train…
August 9, 2017As I begin this, I am rolling through the lush green country of eastern Virginia; we will cross shortly into West Virginia and then begin moving leisurely north through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and then to Chicago for I am on Train #29, the Capitol Limited from Washington, DC to Chicago.
The sun is still high in the west, the side of the train on which I am riding, ensconced in a bedroom compartment, about the size of my bathroom at the cottage; very amenities complete. Dinner is at 6:45 and I am eager to find out who my dining companions will be. Everyone in the past has been a memorable character and I see no reason why this time should be different.
For reasons that have eluded me, yesterday and today, I have been on the cranky side. Yesterday was full of errands to be done before I left and every one of them took more time than allotted. Racing up to Albany, I made a doctor’s appointment exactly on time when I was sure I was going to be late. There was a delicious moment when I felt I had caught up with my day.
Then I was told I had arrived forty-five minutes too early. Stunned, I decided to go get a cup of coffee as I had yet to have any. Returning, there were different receptionists who chided me for being late. Disbelieving of me telling them I had been on time, I finally convinced them. The first receptionist had apparently misread the calendar. Discovering they were all upset because I was to have tests I had not been told I was going to have, I did something very uncharacteristic of me: I was not a good boy.
Taking the forms, I put them down on the counter and said I was upset and would call them when I returned from my trip.
Today was much better and still, though, a little on the cranky side until I rode out to the train with a woman from Greenville, SC. She wanted to see a picture of my creek and when I showed it to her, she said: you’re blessed.
And I am. How quickly we get caught up in the shoelaces of our lives and forget the bigger picture. Taking a very deep breath, I have now settled into my compartment and am enjoying the view out my window: trees in the full flush of green, a river and a bridge crossing it with the sound of clacking train wheels. It is a good moment.
Not so good is the news flash that North Korea, with its pudgy, petulant and unpredictable little dictator has probably miniaturized nuclear warheads to go on top of those ICBMS he has been testing.
Our president has warned him in no uncertain terms that if he uses them he will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
So, we have an unpredictable barely man dictator with nuclear weapons facing an unpredictable aging man boy petulant president who has the nuclear codes to the biggest arsenal on earth. Could this end badly?
Unfortunately, yes.
If it does, I want to be home. At the cottage, with jazz playing and a good martini in front of me because I will absolutely need it.
There are two very huge egos at play here and no one knows how the China card will play. Probably, hopefully, pray God it is, this will all be okay.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, even more than my parents did, I knew, as a child, we were in a dangerous place. We are again and don’t have a John Kennedy and his team, for all his crazy faults, to pull us out.
We have Donald Trump, with all his crazy faults and few strengths I can find, and a team that seems more like The Three Stooges.
Tags:Amtrak, Capitol Limited, Claverack, Claverack Creek, Cuban Missile Crisis, Donald Trump, John Kennedy, Kim Jung-un, life, Media, Politics, The Three Stooges
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