7/2/23

 Sunday, July 2, 2023

In bed at 10:30,l up at 11:30 and onto recliner with a bit of GERD, back bed at 1:00, and up at 7:10.  Let Lilly out and smiled at her usual hesitation when back in: into Geri's room or into the kitchen for a treat. 64℉, cloudy, chance of light rain, high of 72℉, AQI=70, wind NNE at 9 mph, 2 to 11 mph today with gusts up to 19.  The sun rose at 5:16 and will set at 8:35, 15+19.

Local headline: Midwest states, often billed as climate havens, suffer summer of smoke, drought, heat.  The story is written by one reporter from Milwaukee JSOnline and another from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.   "The lingering presence of wildfire smoke has made for an unusual start to summer across the Midwest. It also comes during a near-record drought crisping fields across the Corn Belt and the threat of hotter summers to come."  It's a very troubling story; we're not immune.  I am recalling thinking years ago that a downside of owning a cabin on a lake in the North Woods was no protection from forest fires.  With Canada burning, why not the North Woods across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota?

Wisconsin Avenue, downtown shrouded in smoke

Tom's clothing.  Geri went to Caela's house yesterday and helped her sort and lay out Tom's clothing for a Zoom call with their children today to see who may want any of it.  She secured some items for Repairers of the Breach and I suspect more will be available after today's Zoom call.  A sad task for all.  I always think of Tom when I see the frequent ads for a shirt emblazoned with the message: "That's what I do.  I FIX THINGS and I know stuff."

The Widow's Lament in Springtime  William Carlos Williams

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.

I 

I have to believe Williams was emulating the concluding lines of the world's saddest poem,  Walt Whitman's Come Up From the Fields, Father,:

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch'd, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

WaPo headline: 30 People Hurt, 2 fatally, at site of Baltimore Block Party.   This mass shooting happened in Baltimore but it could have happened in Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, pick your city.  What we know without even reading the story is that the shooters and the victims were Black.  I know this and I believe most readers of the Washington Post or any newspaper carrying the story know this.  The common denominator in America's urban gun crisis is Race.  The shooters and usually the victims are almost always Black, occasionally Hispanic, but rarely White or Asian.  Will there come a point when the news media acknowledge what everyone knows, i.e., that 'everyday' urban gun violence is, if not exclusively at least in very large measure, a Black phenomenon?  I say 'everyday' to distinguish what has come to be viewed as ordinary, commonplace, almost predictable gun violence that occurs in Black neighborhoods and is reported in the middle pages of newspapers from the crazed, racist killings such as occurred in Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg, and the Sikh Temple here in Oak Creek.  Those racially-motivated mass killers are almost invariably White and hate-filled.  The 'ordinary' homicides in our cities are not Black on White crimes or White on Black crimes, but Black on Black crimes committed usually by young Black men.  This fact should give rise to the question of what should be done to try to reduce these homicides by young Black men.  What should be done to make our Inner Cities more neighborhoods and less armed camps?  Why are so many young Black men carrying lethal weapons?  What are the circumstances that prompt them to use them?  Why is the overall crime rate in Black neighborhoods so high compared to other neighborhoods?  Is the reason these questions aren't raised and addressed simply that the White Establishment or Power Structure (how 1960s-ish these terms sound!) doesn't care?  Is Black-on-Black crime thought of the way mafia gang wars used to be thought of?  Let the crooks kill each other off.  Go bear, go mother-in-law?  Isn't it really strong evidence that our society considers Black lives as worth less than White lives?  If young White men were regularly shooting and killing other White people in Whitefish Bay or Fox Point or Port Washington, does anyone think those news stories would be buried in the middle pages of our newspaper?  Or do we fail to address these questions because we know we are in fact powerless to fix them?  That lethal handguns are ubiquitous in our cities and our government has made it impossible to reduce the lethal harm they cause?  Is the only or the preferred solution to the problem of urban gun violence for everybody to arm up?  The best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun?  We saw how well that worked in Uvalde and elsewhere.  How would it have worked or did it work in Baltimore with multiple shooters spraying bullets through a crowded party?  And, with young Black men so often armed in our cities, why are we surprised that urban cops, White and Black, are especially wary of them when making a stop or an arrest or responding to a call?