FailureToCommunicate
FailureToCommunicate's JournalRBG dies and I thought it couldn't get worse. Then today, my older brother passed away...
He had been in somewhat declining health for the last six years since he was assaulted by a drunk guy -hit repeatedly in the head- and had to have emergency brain surgery for the swelling.
After the assault he had to retire and give up his two congregations...he was a minister, like my father.
He never really got back to health after that.
I talked to him yesterday (by phone, he's in North Carolina and no visitors are allowed where he is (was)) but I just didn't have the heart to tell him of RBG's passing. It would've broken his heart even more than it was already.
He mentioned that as bad as he was feeling, he was happy that he had early voted.
I take that as at least a small consolation.
2020 just got even worse. 
-FTC
Edit to add: that talk was virtual ...like almost every human contact these days it seems.
This scene that gets me every time. "I know what to say Homer. I love you, and
I'll never leave you..." spoken by his girlfriend in the film- Wilma - after Homer is assuming she'll just leave him now that he's returned from war missing his hands.
It gets me because I think my mother probably said something similar to my father, a WW ll chaplain, missing both arms.
Her father said to her, when he learned of her new love for my father: "You walk along a path in the woods... and why do you have to pick up the broken branch?"
Luckily for me -and my four brothers- she ignored her father's disapproval and married my father anyway. And never left him.
Wow. Powerful. I saw the same effect on people when my father shared that his disability did
not define him, did not slow him down, or keep him from striving to achieve the same, and much more, than able bodied.
You could see it in people's faces...here was an important man telling them that they could hope to look beyond their disability.
That the right to seek some type of normal life, with fewer barriers to buildings and to the ladder of success, was a civil right.
Some would smile, some beam, some would softly tear up. But always an impact. A reaction to a human outreach of genuine concern and empathy that is far too rare.
And Joe Biden clearly has that empathy.
Top three -or four - for me...so far...
(Edited to swap Michelle (who REALLY has said "No"
for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev)
Kamala Harris,
Florida's Val Demings,
Michelle Lujan Grisham, or...
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto
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