TygrBright
TygrBright's JournalMiraculous
Yesterday I picked up my new hearing aids. First off, my thanks to the peeps in this forum who shared experience and advice. For those who've had devices a long time, you may not remember just how daunting the process of learning you have hearing loss, deciding what to do about it, and obtaining good help, can be. Even so, many of you stepped up and I really leaned into your knowledge and reassurance.
And now my world is BIG again.
I read many descriptions of the experience of hearing with assistive devices - not all good. In fact, one that stayed with me was "Hearing aids help you hear the way a walker helps you dance."
First let me describe my experience - when the receivers went in I was suddenly aware of a whole soundscape that had been occluded, maybe for years, I don't know how long my hearing loss has been slowly and imperceptibly progressing.
Air movement and ventilation fan noise and crowd noise suddenly came in the open door to the booth in the Costco Hearing Aid Center. Then I felt very YOUNG again, college age, with a memory of being in a rehearsal booth in the music department... where did THAT come from? And I realized I was wearing a mask and I could hear my own breathing, the way I used to in those anechoic booths.
Holy crap.
I just sat there, listening... little electronic noises. The chair squeaking. The audio tech's keyboard tapping. The sound from outside.
She glanced over at me, caught the look on my face. "They're working, right?"
Oh, my. Were they ever.
Did you ever watch those teevee shows from the 1950s that were all shot in the studio, but they had sets that represented the outdoors? "Mister Ed" comes to mind, and some others.
The difference I am experiencing is like the difference between the soundscape of those "outdoor" sets, captured in the soundtrack, and being actually outdoors with air moving, birds chatting, cars passing, an aircraft high overhead, pine branches whispering and a hundred other ambient sounds.
I came home and listened to music. The piccolos! The triangle! The harp glissandos go all the way up! I am like a kid in a candy store.
Another thing I noticed: A sudden relaxation, like shedding tight, uncomfortable clothing. What was that about?
I had read that one effect of hearing loss is increased anxiety and fatigue, merely from the increased effort of listening. My hearing loss isn't that bad - mild in some parts of the spectrum, moderate in the high frequency ranges - so I didn't think that applied to me.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
That ever-so-slight tensing up, that unconscious effort in the presence of sound, WAS affecting me. And now it's gone.
I could dance, I could float... I'm like a younger me again.
Is there a downside? It's not like "natural" hearing, though, right? Why do people say they have so much trouble adjusting to hearing devices?
In order: Yes - I'm temporarily way more conscious of sounds my brain used to naturally de-prioritize, when younger me could hear them as a matter of course. They startle me a bit, grab my attention more than I like. I am told that my brain will re-learn to relegate them to its version of 'background' noise, and this will become less acute as I adjust. I hope so.
No, the sound the receiver renders isn't like "natural" hearing, it's more like a soundtrack- but an exquisitely layered, rendered and balanced soundtrack. I'll take it. It is such an enormous improvement over my "natural" impaired hearing - and my brain can no longer supply an accurate impression of what my "natural" youthful hearing was really like in any great detail. So I am not regretting it.
And, I think there are several reasons people might have a lot of trouble adjusting to hearing devices. The obvious ones relate to the quality of the technology and the match between what you need and what a particular type of device offers in the way of configuration, fit, sound rendering, etc. Of course you'll resist adjustment to a badly-fitting or poorly calibrated/programmed device.
But I think there's also another reason. I'm not an audiologist or researcher, this is just my opinion, but I do have experience observing others in my family, from childhood up, coping with our hereditary hearing loss. And I think one thing that makes adjustment difficult is waiting too long to get help.
We know a lot more about auditory deprivation and its effects now, than we used to. Cumulative effects from hearing being an effortful rather than effortless process can produce anxiety, depression, isolation. And maybe if you get too used to that 'dead air' soundscape, your brain reacts to the experience of a vastly expanded soundscape with confusion, rejection, and more annoyance and anxiety at the effort of parsing it into something meaningful?
So, note to my younger self: Don't wait, you'll be glad you didn't put it off another year.
And to anyone who has hereditary hearing loss in your family - start getting your hearing tested early! When loss manifests, don't wait until it gets "bad", because you think you'll "lose" something by replacing the experience of "natural" hearing.
Life is playing its glorious music...
gratefully,
Bright
Early Morning Thoughts on "The Music Man" and Systemic Racism
Over here in the Lounge's Happy Movies thread, someone reminded me about the 1962 film of Meredith Willson's 1957 Broadway hit "The Music Man." All my life, it seems, it's made me happy to re-watch that film, watch clips of the best musical numbers, attend any live performances within reach, etc. So much craft goes into the staging, the rehearsing, the timing of the numbers, the joy of a cast that pulls it off adds a palpable layer of euphoria to the performance. It's just... fun.
Or, it was. I hadn't watched any clips in a while. Maybe 3-4 years since I sat down and watched the whole film. Haven't seen a live version since (I think) 2004.
About the 3rd or 4th clip ("Ya Got Trouble" ) I noticed something in my head wasn't right. By the time I viewed "Wells Fargo Wagon" I was a little uncomfortable. I shut down the feed and went to bed, and woke up with the realization that what was making me itchy about it was how WHITE the damn' thing is.
But is it?
Honestly, the underlying themes and character motivations are universal human things - the fast-talking con artist who realizes there's something bigger and better than the next score; the young woman seeking to be 'different' and find a wider life than the stifling values an insular community offers; locals wary about strangers and change coming in from 'outsiders' learning in the end that if you embrace a change and make it your own, you triumph. Even the little sub-plots of the young lovers in spite of parental opposition, the reformed shill trying to find a place and a home, the squabbling community elders who find unity in shared creative endeavor... all of it could be a Spike Lee film, or an August Wilson script.
Okay, so, maybe it's just how WHITE the cast of the 1962 film is. Glaringly, reflectively white, you could paint a roof in the desert with that white and stay plenty cool under it.
But there have been versions that aren't quite so white... the Kennedy Center did a version with Norm Lewis as Professor Hill, so I watched a couple of clips. (Norm aced it, BTW.) But... nope. Still got that squicky vibe.
There's a new production coming out with Hugh Jackman in the lead role, but a few Black actors got some work in the deal, including Emily Crow as Zaneeta Shinn and Philip Boykin as school board member Olin Britt. In checking this out, I ran across a fair bit of backing-and-forthing in the theater commentary world about how little that is and how this is, yep, one more racist Black-people-need-not-apply lack of opportunity, etc. I can't disagree. Tokens ain't diversity.
There was an all-Black concert (i.e., sung with some dialog but not fully staged) version at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2014. No clips that I could find, but I bet the music was excellent indeed.
All the same, imagining that production from that book (libretto) even with an all-Black cast, still made me uneasy. How about with "color blind casting?" Or, more thoughtfully, "color-conscious casting?" That imagining led me down some interesting research roads and I'm grateful to have learned more about this ongoing discussion in the entertainment world.
But no, that's not it. No matter how carefully cast, thinking about "The Music Man" just hits my "Holy CRAP, is this racist!" button now. Why?
And finally, I teased it out:
It's the setting.
It's the history connected with that setting. That beautifully nostalgic world of rural America in 1912, with its technicolor sunsets and small-town familiarity and family values and quaint technology. It's even more idyllic than "Leave It to Beaver" and the white utopias of 1950s network television.
Leave aside the dark underbelly of realism for white people - women, poor people, discriminated-against ethnic minorities, etc. in 1912 rural America. Postulate that the idyllic portrayal of people who could be worried about the morals of their youth exposed to something as threatening as a POOL TABLE but redeemed by the experience of shared creative joy, is some kind of accurate representation of River City (actually Mason City) in 1912. Could it be?
Possibly.
But at what cost?
Those idyllic small-town America hamlets may have existed, they may even have been as serene and cosy as portrayed. They may have nurtured all those virtues of sturdy self-reliance AND concern for neighbors and friends, appreciation for patriotic expression, support for tradition and family and all the rest of those good and happy things.
But looking at America in 1912, what else was going on?
Well, the Daughters of the Confederacy were busily promoting a narrative of white supremacy, rewriting textbooks, installing monuments, and insisting on a version of history that was "fair" to the racist traitor losers who fought for an economy based on slavery. Jim Crow laws were on the rise in the South. Northern cities were ghettoizing Black people who migrated there and installing all kinds of extrajudicial forms of segregation - redlining, employment restrictions, covenants, designated second-class schools, etc.
In 1912 there were lynchings in Arkansas and Texas; in 1911 there had been five lynchings including one in Pennsylvania. America's economy was changing from primarily agrarian to primarily industrial - and in both versions, the near-slavery exploitation of Black labor enabled white oligarchs to allow sufficient wealth to trickle to a growing white middle class to bolster white supremacy and their own hold on power.
In other words, what Meredith Willson remembered from his youth in Mason City may indeed have been idyllic - as idyllic as frosting, spread on a cake baked with a large amount of shit among the ingredients.
Color-conscious casting isn't going to address that. There is simply no way to shoehorn the notion of a Black person AS a Black person into any of those roles. There wouldn't have been a Black Mayor in rural Iowa. There wouldn't have been Black school board members. No Black piano teacher teaching the little girls of the town or running the Library. No mixed marriages back then, either. And no socially acceptable Black couples in the upper strata of town leadership, for sure. Eulalie McKecknie Shinn and her gossip flock would have included not a single Black woman.
What about "color-blind" casting?
It occurs to me that any brown faces at all in a "Music Man" cast may well contribute to the entirely idealized version of history portrayed in "The Music Man". No matter who or how you cast a Black actor in that story, it will be incongruous and antihistorical. A Black conman trying to sell band instruments to white rural families? Mayor Shinn wouldn't have told the school board to "get his credentials!", he would have headed the mob running the (Black) Professor out of town on a rail... if he was lucky.
A Black Marian Paroo? (Well, sure, there were Black Irish, but...) No, sorry, in 1912, no Black face would have appeared in a rural Iowa library unless it was after closing hours, with a bucket and a mop, maybe.
Presenting, on the stage, a River City of 1912 with a sprinkling of brown faces among the white - does it allow us to sanitize and ignore the brutal historical reality of 1912 America for those same brown people? Does it enable our complicity in the appreciation of that lovely white boiled icing atop that shit-infused cake?
I love the music. I love the stories of the characters.
But I'll never be able to watch it again without a troubling awareness of just how racist River City was, and remains.
This is what growing beyond racism is about for white me in 21st-Century America. I embrace it in the hope that someday my grandson will routinely be able to attend fabulous musical theater embracing the experiences of Americans who aren't white, in a wide variety of historical and geographic settings. And it will be great, and fun, and a part of the entertainment landscape both ordinary and celebrated.
hopefully,
Bright
It's not about "white guilt". It's not about "retaliation".
So why DO we need to confront America's legacy of racism and genocide?
It is manifestly true that if you go back far enough in history, everyone's ancestors were oppressed by someone else's ancestors.
Doing the dirty on those we decide are "other" is one of the oldest evolutionary contributions to human survival. Stripped of all cultural context, we are programmed to ensure the survival of our children first, even those not yet born, even at the expense of others' children. If you don't survive to pass on your DNA, and your children don't live to pass it on yet again, you're an evolutionary failure.
How far back do we have to go, to find one of your ancestors enslaving one of mine? Or one of my ancestors raping and killing one of yours?
This truth has been used to justify an awful lot of denial.
Here's why the descendants of my European ancestors massacring others' Lakota ancestors outweighs my Pictish ancestors being massacred by someone else's Saxon ancestors. Or why my Briton ancestors being enslaved by someone else's Norse ancestors is outweighed by the enslavement of my neighbor's African ancestors by descendents of my European forebears:
Neither the institution of "thralldom" nor the culture of my Pictish forebears has a major role in shaping how the institutions of modern American life affect us today. (The possible exception of the Asatru revival aside, of course... but that in itself is just an effort to perpetuate the problem, isn't it?)
America's culture and ALL of our social institutions - churches, education systems, economy, entertainment, even our sense of what is and isn't allowable in how we treat other people - are shaped by the actions of the mostly-Europeans who muscled onto this continent for their own profit. They brought along their disregard for the value of any kind of human being except those like themselves. And upon this, they founded a nation.
And, before anyone starts whining about me being a traitor to the White Race >gag< let me stipulate that yes, those patriarchal racist Europeans had a lot of ideas that were both good and even, yes, revolutionary, about constructing a nation to produce liberty and justice for all who looked like them, anyway.
Yep, there's a lot of good stuff in John Locke, and the Enlightenment movement generally, and even in those Greek and Roman and early Christian Fathers who wrote about how we should be treating one another and how our societies should handle issues of fairness and opportunity and various knotty problems of Getting Along With Each Other. And those white male Founding Fathers faithfully absorbed it and transferred their understanding of those ideas into the writings that shaped our Constitution and founding documents.
They built a pretty amazing state, okay, maybe even a Shining City on a Hill. For white male property owners, anyway.
But...
What ideas did they NOT include? The writings of Lao Tzu, of Maimonides, of ibn Habash Suhrawardi? The great oral traditions passed along by the Sachem of the Haudenosaunee? A vast body of human knowledge was outside their experience and understanding.
The assumptions of manifest destiny, the patriarchal structure of Christian denominational doctrine, the inherent belief that only people with white skin and penises are fully capable of actuating the nation-state's power structure, were BAKED INTO America along with the inspiring truths of the Founding Fathers' rhetoric.
But to them, "All men are created equal" really meant MEN. Men like them. This was perhaps the biggest tip-off of all. Not "all people" and certainly not "all peoples". And they built their palladian mansions on the Potomac from the profits of human bondage.
People who wanted to be good, doing evil things.
Their noble intentions and beneficent accomplishments make it all the harder to renounce that evil.
But America will never fully realize the stunning breadth of their vision - a breadth they themselves were unaware of - until WE, their physical, spiritual, and moral descendants, undo their evil.
All of us. But especially those of us they endowed, not with "certain unalienable rights" but certain unalienable PRIVILEGES, so intrinsic to skin color, gender identity, and cultural heritage that many of us are no more aware of them than a fish is of water.
We cannot build the America of the future without coming to terms not only with the America of the past, but the present shaped by that past. We cannot "see" the present with a full 360-degree view, unless we allow the visions of those who have other experiences of America into the picture. We cannot hear and learn from all of American history without listening to the voices of those who had those experiences.
We are not fully "America" until those who suffered from the truncated, incomplete understanding of "liberty and justice for all" are as fully a part of the narrative as those whose forebears meted out that suffering.
It is not about "punishing" white people for the actions of previous generations. It is not about making us feel guilt, or shame.
It is about giving us the gift of sight beyond a narrow vision circumscribed by what we have excluded, until now. It is about giving us the gift of learning and understanding a definition of 'human' that encompasses much more than we have allowed ourselves to imagine. And yes, that will involve some pain, and discomfort. Maybe even some shame and regret.
But let's circle back, now, to the reality that all of our ancestors have done horrible things to the ancestors of those different from themselves. That human inheritance is with us all. Not to deny or escape, but to transcend. We can do this.
And we must, if we are to survive.
determinedly,
Bright
Media Congloms are SUFFERING. SUFFERING, I tell you! They need HELP!
So Biden's presiding over the fastest economic recovery in modern history.
Unemployment numbers have reached a 50-year low.
The supply chain is recovering faster than experts would have believed possible.
Vaccination rates continue going up, new treatment drugs are close to being presented for approval, and other good Covid developments are happening every day.
This is JUST TERRIBLE!
TERRIBLE, I TELL YOU!
What is a poor media mogul to do?
During the tenure of [Redacted], most media companies achieved record ratings, earnings, and audiences. The nation - and the world - were riveted by the ongoing horror show, and the media was dutifully covering every new catastrophe, every tragedy, every grotesque distortion of good in 24/7 close-up detail.
And the addicts responded. We clicked, we watched, we commented, we shared, we passed it along, we discussed, we subscribed, we shoveled the cash their way, directly and indirectly.
Now, like the corner drug dealer when a new street clinic opens up down the block and suddenly traffic is down, the media outlets are frantic - where are their customers?!? They have PRODUCT to move! Bottom lines to meet!! Higher-up bosses to please - bosses who aren't afraid to decimate subordinates who can't deliver the eyeballs and the clicks.
Fuck journalism, they need NUMBERS!
And good economic news, effective pandemic strategies, foreign policy progress, etc., don't deliver for the junkies they've trained us to be.
The only solution I know is the one we can't possibly implement: Break up the monopolies, re-implement an updated Fairness Doctrine, take control of the commons' airwaves, broadband, etc., back into the hands of an agency with a mission to ensure they operate to the public good.
Failing that, we're stuck on the rollercoaster, and we're running outta vomit wipes.
wearily,
Bright
This time there will be no silence.
When I was a child, there was a conspiracy of silence.
Forced births were hidden.
Deaths from unsafe abortions were hidden.
They weren't talked about.
It was all shadows and euphemisms... "Wayward Girls' Home"... "Sepsis following a minor injury"... "She's away visiting relatives."
Their names weren't spoken. The veil was drawn over them, their tragedies were forgotten. Their names were erased, their lives were erased.
The lies were endless.
Girls just disappeared, sometimes. "She went to live with her aunt in another state, she's going to school there." Illnesses like tuberculosis and polio and pneumonia were used to explain the funerals.
NOT.
ANY.
MORE.
Every death, every forced birth, every tragedy is going to be SHOUTED.
We will not go back into the silence.
Count on it.
We'll go to jail if we have to.
And we'll tell the story of WHY, with PRIDE.
We will wear the prosecutions and persecutions like badges of honor.
We will testify with our bodies, with our voices.
Be prepared.
determinedly,
Bright
Towards the New Normal
We missed the "wipe it out forever" window, with Covid.
To be sure, it wasn't much of a window, and it wasn't open very long... perhaps a three- or four-month period at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 when a tremendous, unified effort could have shut down the pandemic in its tracks. In retrospect, it was probably an unrealistic hope even without the sabotage of world leaders who didn't want to deal with the expense, the inconvenience, and the potential political costs to themselves.
So what are the possibilities for "normal" now?
Like many other diseases, Covid in its various forms will become "endemic" rather than "pandemic."
But that, in itself, offers a wide spectrum of possible realities.
At the worst-case end of the spectrum, we could drag on for many years, fighting recurring waves of local epidemics, coping with the repeated emergence of increasingly-dangerous variants, and seeing a constant, ongoing mortality toll wax and wane from region to region globally. This "normal" would have a painful and dismaying array of secondary economic, political, and cultural effects. It is possible because of the number of powerful and wealthy parties who see potential profit and/or benefit to themselves in maintaining it.
At the other, best-case, end of the spectrum, we could reach a place where Covid becomes one of many serious but not-too-common diseases that flare up locally from time to time and are quickly suppressed by established medical and public health protocols everyone understands and supports. Fatality rates would diminish, becoming occasional, even rare. It would have little if any lasting or noticeable secondary economic, political or cultural effects.
We have everything we need to bring about that second version of "normal" within as little as a year. Only three tools are required:
1. Potent, safe vaccines
2. Rapid, accurate tests; and
3. Effective treatments
These three things are now all available.
So, are we on our way to that best-case "new normal"?
Not so fast.
All of those things are available, but to bring about that best-case status quo, they must for a time become more than available - even more than 'accessible' - they must become universally accessible, even ubiquitous. This is what's called the "suppression phase", when public health works to bring transmission rates as close to zero as possible.
We are working toward this level of accessibility with the first tool - vaccines. Not there yet, there are still parts of the earth where vaccines are scarce and/or expensive, and/or difficult to get. But we've made progress in many of the world's more complex economies. In America, where I live, anyone who wants to can now receive a full course of vaccines and even vaccine boosters, with no or only modest effort and expense to themselves.
Still, we could do better with the "uptake rate" for vaccines, but that's a different kind of challenge, not related to the basic technology or logistics.
Follow the link on the second item to see an analysis of the principal logistical challenges related to rapid, accurate tests - they are now possible, but they remain expensive. Production has not been scaled up, there is no wide-scale logistical effort to manage a supply chain that will put a supply in every home medicine chest cheaply or even free. We have not established and normalized required testing protocols for communal activities such as school, work, recreation, etc., during the "suppression" period to bring transmission rates close to zero.
And finally, the third item - effective treatment - remains at an early, if promising, stage of development. But these are most vulnerable to a complex and poorly-conceived regulatory patchwork that forms a thorny barrier to ongoing testing and development of additional safe and effective treatments. They're also within the control sphere of one of the greediest and most rapacious forms of capitalist endeavor in the world economy - the pharmaceutical industries.
So far, those corporations have shown a reasonable awareness of the public relations aspect of their work, and a certain discretion in applying the equations of demand-based pricing in the current political minefield.
Suffice to say, making effective treatments cheaply and universally available remains a complicated task.
But not an unachievable one.
In fact, none of the barriers preventing the level of near-universal access to these three tools are uncrossable in any technical or logistical terms.
What will prevent us from mounting an effective suppression effort, nationally or even worldwide, is the same set of problems that are keeping vaccination rates lower than they should be: Issues of political will.
Political will is required to overcome the reluctance to mount the high-level public education and communications campaigns required.
Political will is required to suspend, bypass, revise and develop new regulations, protocols and standards that will enable fast but careful and monitored development, testing, and upscaling of the needed tools.
Political will is required to mobilize the resources for an effective supply chain and delivery conduit of all tools.
Political will is required to revise and stave off the attempts of would-be profiteers, litigation-happy opportunists and their enablers, grifters, and outright saboteurs.
Understand this:
"Political will" is not created by politicians. Politicians, left to themselves, will bend to the proximate winds of moneyed lobbyists and campaign mega-donors.
"Political will" is something politicians respond to, in many cases only with the greatest reluctance, when it becomes both crystal clear and overwhelmingly prevalent in their own milieu.
"Political will" is made by people who use information to build broad and/or intense support for a clearly articulated, understandable, unequivocal goal, and who patiently and relentlessly demand politicians respond by making that goal a reality.
Those people can be wealthy corporate lobbyists, maliciously-motivated foreign agitators working behind cadres of useful idiots, media moguls preparing for their next quarterly stockholders' call, or...
...they can be us. They can be the choices we make. The discussions we have. The donations we give. The actions we take. The communications we have with our representatives and their staff. The community meetings we attend. The Party work we volunteer for or offices we hold.
We have the numbers.
Do we have the political will?
curiously,
Bright
Saving Thanksgiving
I can't express how much I love the notion of a holiday dedicated to giving thanks for all the ordinary and extraordinary blessings in our lives throughout a year. Were it but that, my enjoyment would be unshadowed and my efforts at celebration much more wholehearted.
My problem isn't the gratitude part.
It's the history part.
Let's face it, the history is pretty squicky. Essentially, it's the Plymouth Colony saying to the Wampanoag, "Geez, y'all, we wouldn't have made it without you - let's have a nice celebratory feast together before we get started wiping y'all from the face of the continent!"
So... the whole Pilgrim's Hat, "Indian" corn, horn-of-plenty overflowing with the Three Sisters produce symbolism kind of takes the edge off my enjoyment.
I wonder what it would take, to divorce the concept of a holiday devoted to being thankful for the wonders of life over the year?
Move the date? Certainly stop teaching that creepy "Thanksgiving Story" history without the actual context around it. Change the symbols somehow?
Just musing, on this day before the day.
And for the record, one thing I'm thankful for, this and every year since 2001, is DU and all the wonderful people here. Glad there's an excuse to let y'all know.
Now I'm-a cue up The Restaurant and start labeling 8x10 glossies with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back...
appreciatively,
Bright
When the weariness overwhelms...
It is hard not to be exhausted today.
It is hard not to be exhausted by the injustice. By the weight of accumulating pain. By the possibility of darkness falling.
It is hard not to be exhausted from holding back the tears, or the rage, or the despair.
It is hard not to be exhausted by expressing the sorrow, the anger, the anxiety.
It is hard not to be exhausted by the perception of fear in people all around me, manifesting as hate, rage, lack of empathy, intolerance, and the desperate need to control other human beings.
It is hard not to be exhausted by the apparent futility of being able only to hope, to pray, to make small gestures of kindness on a very small scale, in the face of a seemingly-unstoppable tide of indifference to human suffering.
It is hard not to be exhausted by an anxiety for the future of my grandson and the world he will live in - and hoping there will be a livable world in some form.
It would be so easy to give up, just for a day. To go back to bed, to tell everyone "Don't bother me, I can't help, I can't listen to your pain, I can't cope with my own weariness, much less anyone else's problems."
And then for another day, and another... because the tide of human fear just continues to roll in, fed by the waves of grift and power-seeking and profiting from the misery of others.
But I
WILL
NOT
GIVE
UP.
Instead, I will raise my eyes, quite literally, to the hills, whence flows help. Here in northern New Mexico, the hills-- well, mountains, actually-- are all around, larger and older than any human work.
They endure.
They give life.
They shelter so much life, providing refuge.
They are scarred by fires, natural and human-caused, but if you walk in those daunting places and really look around you, you see the eternal beginnings of rebirth springing from the soil, anchored on the rocks.
And I look in my back yard, where flocks of sparrows, bushtits, and finches visit the feeder and play in the birdbaths and sun themselves on the bushes, rejoicing in the warming rays on a chilly day.
They keep going.
They express their joy, even in the face of impending winter.
And I walk around my block, and as I pass each house I silently wish its inhabitants-- humans, dogs, cats, plants, whatever-- a respite from fear, and a deep breath of serenity to bring the sun into their hearts. Yes, all of them, every house, every neighbor, even the ones with Republican yard signs during recent elections. If my fears are deep and painful, how much more so must theirs be?
All hate is rooted in fear. All indifference to suffering, all rage, all denial of humanity, is sourced in some existential fear, preying in hearts and minds and spirits like a despoiling leech.
I will to reject hate.
I will to reject fear.
I will to turn away from exhaustion, and seek instead a quiet place within, fed by contemplation of quiet places without, for they exist.
Kindness exists.
Love exists.
Light exists.
And it is ALWAYS stronger than darkness.
So now I'll take the time to answer a call or two, to listen to someone else's pain, to find what words of comfort I can. To affirm the Light.
And I will go on.
Thank you for letting me share this with you. My heart to yours.
resolutely,
Bright
Uninformed Takes on the Rittenhouse Trial/Outcome
There are a number of people here on DU who apparently feel free to opine on the trial, the verdict, etc. They get all emotional about it. They use words like "miscarriage of justice" and "systemic racism" and even more inflammatory terms.
Tsk-tsk.
You see, 1. These people don't know what they are talking about.
They are not lawyers, legal scholars, Constitutional jurists, well-informed legal analysts or experienced journalists on the judicial system beat. They don't understand the nuances of courtroom procedure, the constraints attorneys and judges must heed in order for their work to conform with the statutes and precedents that structure justice in America and/or particularly in Wisconsin. They probably haven't even read the many detailed and in-depth analyses of the trial proceedings that have been published in the press, online, etc., the last few weeks. They don't "get it."
And, 2. These people appear to believe that Democratic Underground is a themed social message board, not a juried, facts-only, Very Serious Discussion Forum for Highly Informed and Very Serious Legal Scholars.
So they are bringing in their wholly uninformed, emotional reactions to something they know effectively nothing about, and muddying the waters of Clear and Fact-Based Discourse with wild opinions, perfervid ranting, attempts to gin up and increase mere feeling-based outrage, and will actually end up DAMAGING THEIR OWN CAUSE by perpetuating uniformed and potentially harmful arguments in a public forum that should confine itself to measured, fact-based exploration, analysis, deconstruction, review, and the drawing of tentative hypotheses and possible incremental improvements to be carefully considered.
Which has a much higher chance of resulting in lasting, positive incremental changes than an outpouring of emotionally-based, unbalanced, uninformed outrage that a white teenager was able to shoot three people who were engaging in anti-racism protest and possibly even civil disobedience (although THAT certainly wasn't proved in the context of the incident or established at the trial), and that shooting caused the death of two of those people.
See, you don't know what you're talking about.
You think this is about a privileged white adolescent illegally obtaining killing tools and putting a shitload of effort into seeking out a particular type of excitement without regard to the law or the lives of other human beings.
You think this is about a judicial system fucked up with systemic racism to the extent that said adolescent can walk free after bullets from the gun he was illegally carrying far from his own home or property, bullets that left the muzzle of that gun when HE pulled the trigger, entered the bodies of three people, causing injury to one and ending the lives of two more.
You think this is about wider evidence of people from that court's jury pool, from the press, from Informed Legal Scholars and Important Knowledgeable Pundits being so focused on the drama of the trial itself and so blind, deaf, and dumb to the fundamental issues of social injustice, racism, gun violence, and mounting public tolerance of lethal authoritarian tactics by both law enforcement and vigilantes, that they can nod with regretful affirmation that those lives were worth less than the observation and preservation of a massively biased judicial process.
That of course, is where you're wrong. Take some time. Study the issues. Stop going off half-cocked expressing your outrage about what isn't the Real Issue at all. Stop trying to get other people-- smarter, more well-informed, balanced, people-- to share your horror at the situation.
Sit back and let them debate exactly what went wrong - not the emotional stuff like racism, corruption, etc., but the REAL stuff, like the wording of particular statutes, what decisions the prosecution SHOULD have made about which evidence to emphasize, what precedents the judge should never have brought in to support various rulings, etc.
After they've debated that enough, maybe a few years down the road, they'll come up with a list of a couple of things about the system that should be fixed, and then we can start the long process of getting laws revised, getting officers of the court investigated and censured, and other actions that will produce Real and Lasting Change.
Because widely-shared emotional responses to a fundamental outrage have never actually produced any worthwhile action.
So sit down and take a chill pill, y'all, and let the Real Experts sort it out.
admonitorially,
Bright
(And because I know it'll be absolutely necessary to tell some people here, the foregoing rant was 100% 
.)
Cheese it, Comrades! They're onto us! (RW Galaxy Brain explosion)
CODE BUNGUS! The cardinal flies at noon. Fly, all is discovered. The fried egg has broken windows.
They have figured out our cunning plot:
A few weeks ago, Breitbart News — the right-wing, hyperpartisan news site formerly run by Steve Bannon — published a truly galaxy brain column. Editor-at-large John Nolte argued that Democrats have been promoting the COVID-19 vaccine not to save lives but instead to trick Republican voters into not getting the jab. Nolte’s theory concluded that this, in turn, would lead to unvaccinated Republicans getting sick and dying from COVID-19, ultimately helping Democrats electorally.
They figured it out! And it only took them eleven months... Damn, they're sharp!
The Central Committee is in an Emergency Strategy Session in the Lombard Street Dominos' basement as I write this.
Stay tuned, Comrades....
earnestly,
Commissar Bright
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