Saturday, May 5, 2023
In bed by 10, up at 6:04, seeming to hear pile driving from the County Line bridge construction, or is it my heartbeat? 51℉, drizzle, high 57℉, wind SSE at 10 mph, 7 to 12 mph today, gusts up to 25 mph, total rainfall of .25" expected today. Sun rose at 5:38, sunset at 7:58, 14+19.
Dinner with the Kevils. We had a delightful dinner with David and Sharon and Ellis last night, celebrating Sharon's 45th birthday a couple of days late. David prepared homemade crab Rangoon and stone crab legs which we enjoyed before sitting down at the dining room table for fried rice with bay scallops and a salad. At the end of the dinner, Ellis entertained with a spirited reading of her book about a 3rd grade class and their lunch at the school with chicken nuggets and PA announcements by Miss Saltwalter. Ellis has great reading skill and even greater dramatic skills - thoroughly enjoyable for all of us. We both think she is an extraordinary child, and not just from grandparently bias.
American Dystopia: "A Country Governed by Fear -How America became a violent society" By Elizabeth Bruenig.
"[C]ertain factors can turn an uncomfortable situation into an intolerable one, such as living in a society where anybody could have a gun, where any agitation can boil over into mass murder. An irate neighbor slaying five people with an AR-15-style rifle after a noise complaint in Texas; an unstable Coast Guard veteran killing one and injuring four while attending an appointment with his mother in an Atlanta hospital. The stakes in any given episode of public agitation or distress or even psychosis aren’t typically all that high; the majority of people having crises at any time represent no risk to anyone (save, perhaps, themselves), but the incessant rat-a-tat of bloody headlines makes people feel—viscerally—that the risks they do encounter are unbearably dangerous."
I think of the 84 year old man in Kansas City who shot in the head the 14 year old boy who mistakenly rang his doorbell to pick up his brother. 84 years old = feelings of vulnerabilty (based on the reality of increased vulnerablity.) Add fear of young Black men (based on a steady stream of news stories about violent crimes committed by young Black men.) Add having a loaded pistol in the home (one of a number perhaps exceeding 350,000,000 lethal firearms in the United States.) The fact is that each one of us is in danger of being the victim, intended or unintended, of a gunshot. Driving to the VA on the freeway puts me at risk of gunshots, either because of a road rage incident or perhaps catching a stray shot in a moving gun fight between members of opposing inner city gangs. The lighter your skin, the less your risk of a gunshot wound; the darker your skin, the greater the risk.
The occasion for Margaret Breunig's essay was the chokehold strangulation killing of a mentally ill Black man on a subway in NYC.
"This process, through which mundane uncomfortable situations are transformed into terrifying ordeals by all the incidents of random gun violence that came before, is one means by which a healthy community becomes a violent society. Nobody looks forward to encountering people behaving erratically on the subway, and neither does anyone want to fall victim to an act of stochastic violence, but killing a mentally ill man on a train doesn’t represent much of an improvement upon either circumstance. It represents the loss of a peaceful commons, the absence of compassion, and the overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence. This is the country we have become."
I know that the odds of me or any of my loved ones becoming the victim of a gunshot wound, lethal or otherwise, are infinitesimally small. I do not let the fear of freeway shootings keep me from using the freeway on my frequent trips to the VA. But as Margaret Breunig points out, it is the awareness of the ubiquity of guns and the knowledge that any given stranger we may encounter may be both armed and willing to shoot his firearm for any number of reasons that has turned us into a society of fear, the "overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence."
In addition to the fear of violence, especially gun violence, we have the fear of creeping Fascism, or 'authoritarianism' as it is euphemistically called in news reports. We have come to see that a significant minority of Americans are quite willing to sacrifice our so-called imperfect democracy for the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. The only guy who MAYBE is standing between us and a second and infinitely more dangerous term of office for Trump is Joe Biden, who would be 82 years old at the beginning of his second term, 86 at its end. He has frozen out all other possible candidates to take on Donald Trump as the likely Republican candidate. And it appears he is committed to keeping the unpopular Kamala Harris as his vice president running mate. Trump and those he appointed to powerful goveernmental offices did their best to wreck our governement and our imperfect 'rule of law'. He has filled the judiciary with fellow trevelers like the judge in Florida who threw a monkey wrench into the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the judge in Texas who reversed the FDA findings on the safety of mifepristone. Not to mention Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett and the damage they have done and will do to the country in the decades ahead. If the risk of personally experiencing gun violence is small, I can't say the same of the risk of the country becoming Fascist and this will profoudly effect our children, our grandchildren, and all Americans, indeed the whole world. I am trembling.
Meh. This was the one word entry that Sarah posted to FB today. I commented: "Meh too." I'm feeling helf dead today, mind-dead, zombieish. Cause unknown. The day itself is gray and dismal, with rain and thunderstorms expected this evening.
Coronation Day in London. There is something really sick about this event. The UK is a nation on its heels. The king/queen/royals nonsense is really a nostalgic celebration of Empire, of the days when English swells ruled over, exploited, plundered, and oppressed people who were unable to resist British naval and military power, people like the Irish and East Indians.
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