Cloudy future?
It’s a Wednesday evening as I begin this, the 15th, the day taxes are due. I am on extension, for the first time in several years. This winter defeated me, a fractured ankle, snowed in without power, then layering in the demands of buying for the summer… Just couldn’t happen.
Which makes me wonder, as it does all the time, why our tax system is so convoluted? Don’t the Brits fill in a postcard? Something like that. Our system seems Byzantine, shaped, as I recall, by lobbying activities of companies like H&R Block, who make their living out of our complicated tax code.
While I am coping with the tax code, we are dealing with our president having sent out an AI generated image of himself as Christ, healing someone who looks rather like Jon Stewart – someone I am not sure he would like to heal. According to Trump, he thought it made him look like a doctor. Please? And, no, Mr. Vance, I don’t think Trump thought it was a joke.
It was taken down when the backlash started, replaced by another image of him with Jesus. Really? Trump isn’t a great example of Christian values. [I know there are many who’d disagree with me. It’s okay.]
The two of them, Trump and Vance, have attacked Pope Leo XIV because he has had the temerity to criticize the war with Iran and the administration’s immigration policies. “Unacceptable” is a word used by the Pontiff. Good on you, Leo!
Trump responded by calling the pope “weak on crime” and accused him of catering to the radical left.
Vance told the pope he should stick to matters of morality. Well, that’s what I think Leo was doing, sticking to matters of morality. Evidently, our president and vice president and the pope have differing ideas on morality. In this one, I’m with Leo.
I have been deliciously happy for the last couple of weeks. It feels I’ve been living in the moment, tasting the wonder of simple things, eggs for breakfast, the lightening of the weather, having the door of the store open all day, lighthearted conversations with customers, the softness of falling asleep under warm blankets as the day cooled.
There are moments when guilt seeps in around the edges of my happiness [I was, after all, raised Roman Catholic]; this is not a happy planet, though its beauty was vividly exhibited by the Artemis II astronauts, who sent us photos of the inestimable gorgeousness of our planet, beyond the notion of borders. We are a small planet in the universe, inhabited by small-minded people.
The United States is currently run by men like Trump and Hegseth, more morally aligned with the ethos of Roman rulers than contemporary ones. Might makes right. Isn’t that how Crassus, one of original Triumvirs, richest man in Rome, came to his end? Thinking Rome invincible, wanting glory, ended by being destroyed by the Parthians.
Do not get me started about the Ayatollahs of Iran. Or Bibi! Putin. All are men who favor war over peace.
Orban accepted defeat, surprising me. Personally, I thought he’d do a Trump.
Little can be believed, actually, from the mouth of our president as his habit for mendacity has been long established. [Some will hate me for that remark but, I fear, its truth is pretty inconvertible.]
Is there a ceasefire with Iran? I am constantly confused. [See above statement.] I am now confused by almost everything happening in Iran. Another aircraft carrier has arrived. More pressure. Where will this lead? I don’t know and am afraid.
A ceasefire has been declared in Lebanon; I am grateful. Then extended. I am more grateful.
Birthright citizenship is being attacked by this administration. The current Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was born in this country before his parents were citizens which puts him in the category of being a birthright citizen. Does anyone else see the irony in this? Or maybe the stupidity? Duplicity?
It makes me wonder about my own ancestry. My parents might have been birthright citizens. They were born here of immigrant parents though I have no concrete proof my grandparents were citizens. Really, on what slippery ground does this put many of us?
We have so often, in so many different times, forgotten we are almost all of us, descendants of immigrants. Recently, a friend told me his father, a child immigrant, holding a lofty position in his community, never actually became a citizen. His father was illegal, very successful, but never left the country because he didn’t have the paperwork.
I wish I had sent this before the White House Correspondents Dinner – then I wouldn’t have to address that piece of mayhem but – I didn’t, so here I am. Scandalous security? Probably. And no this isn’t another reason to build the ballroom. It is a reason to get a grip on guns.
God alone knows with the conspiracy theorists are saying; I am doing my best to avoid all that after reading one post.
Donald Trump and his minions are tatting the fabric of America with no real understanding of what that fabric really is, awash in America the Mighty, which gives us, they think, the right to do what we want.
George Washington would be appalled, I suspect.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack Friday, September 1, 2017 From the safety of the cottage, tears…
September 3, 2017Earlier today, I went to pick up the mail at the Post Office and as I was about to turn off the car, an interview started on NPR with Andrew White who, along with hundreds of other volunteer Texans, formed what is known as the “Texas Navy” and went out into the flooded streets of Houston. With a sixteen-foot boat and a twenty-horsepower motor and the help of friends, he rescued at least a hundred people, including a man with cerebral palsy and a man who was being treated for cancer and was having a bad reaction to his treatment and needed to get to his hospital. They got him within two blocks of where he needed to go; later the water in the neighborhood of the man with cerebral palsy rose another five feet after the rescue.
Sitting there, tears began flowing down my cheeks. Andrew White’s story was replicated by others all over Harris County which holds the city of Houston, citizen volunteers taking care of other citizens in need. It was the story of what is so often wonderful about this country.
Writing about it causing tears to build in my eyes and I am sniffling.
These are the stories, replicated in all kinds of tragedies around this country, that are the reasons we are great. Oh, we’re miserable S.O.B.’s sometimes but when it comes to disaster, we rise to the challenge in an incredible way and that makes me proud.
From Louisiana came the “Cajun Navy” that formed after Katrina, men and women who knew firsthand what was happening on the ground in Texas and they brought in their bayou boats and lent a hand, calling it “paying it forward.” Just as Texans had come to help them in Katrina.
Houston is home to thousands of refugees from Katrina, people who have found it hard to believe they are living through this twice in their lives.
J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans has raised over $12 million between practices for the coming season, coming off the field to work the phones.
Watt’s hometown is Pewaukee, WI and semis are traveling from there loaded with food and water and supplies. He started out with a goal of raising $200,000 and he just kept on going. Texas billionaire, Michael Dell, has pledged $36 million.
A group of “monster trucks,” organized by a group called Rednecks with Paychecks, is roaming the area, rescuing people and vehicles.
440,000 people have registered for aid from FEMA, as the Mayor of Houston is appealing for an “army” of FEMA officials to help with the claims.
The area that was water covered was larger than the state of Rhode Island. As the water recedes, it leaves behind contaminated water unfit for human consumption, filled with pathogens. Shelters, sometimes islands in a sea of water, are running low or out of food and water.
The damaged Arkema chemical plant can no longer cool the dangerous materials stored there and authorities have evacuated everyone within a mile and a half of the facility. There have been “pops” and plumes of smoke from the plant with no one knowing whether that’s all there is going to be or if it is just the beginning. “Brock” Long, head of FEMA, called the situation there incredibly dangerous.
Bowling alleys are filled with people; Walmart parking lots have been helipads.
And what is amazing and so wonderful and so DAMN great, is that so much of what is happening is unorganized. It is just people getting out to help other people. One man observed that no one was really organizing anything. People seemed to have an instinct for what needed to be done.
Like the “Texas Navy” and Andrew White, who it turns out is the son of a former Texas governor who passed away last month, and the people in the “Cajun Navy.”
People helping other people in a way that moves me to tears, far away, in the soft safety of my cottage.
Tags:Brock Long, Cajun Navy, Claverack Cottage, Claverack Creek, FEMA, Houston Texas, Hurricane Harvey, JJ Watt, Politics, Texas Navy
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