Not since Thanksgiving have I attended to this blog. It is easy to focus on Facebook or other sites and not this one. I did in fact write a few actual private journal entries. So much has happened that the day to day events have absorbed my thinking. Our short stay in Cloudland Canyon State Park over New Years Day was meant to be a meditative experience away from the Impeachment, from work, from the internet. I do think it important to share some of that lovely place here.
As for the Impeachment of Trump and the presently ongoing "trial," there are no surprises. It is cynicism in action. Adam Schiff's persuasive prosecution of Trump's months long attempt to bribe and intimidate the president of Ukraine to make an announcement of an investigation of Biden and son fell on deaf Republican ears. Worse, the Republicans seem determined to have no witnesses, including Bolton, who has said he will honor a subpoena and testify to the Senate. There has never been an impeachment of anyone, president, judge, or anyone else with no witnesses... until now. I think we are slipping day by day into dictatorship. Worse, we are becoming a dictatorship of cruelty to minorities and the minority children put in cages and traumatized, if not abused. A dictatorship of corporate pollution and development at the expense of what is left of the natural beauty and wildlife of the country. Even the National Parks are not safe. The programs many of us depend on, programs into which we have paid our working lives, social security and medicare are under attack and could be decimated if Trump is re-elected. Americans seem anti-intellectual, misogynistic, stupidly optimistic, and indifferent to the most important values and virtues of our brief history. This is how fascism begins, or in this age, corporate oligarchy. Climate crisis is worsening and people refuse to comprehend it. All praise to the companies and people who favor wind power and renewable energy; but they are not enough. We have only to watch Australia burn, the Amazon burn or be destroyed by developers, Jakarta fall into the rising seas, the deadly smog of India, the floods and fires everywhere to know that life on Earth and civilization itself is in trouble.
Thus, I continue to be a pessimist. I am able to enjoy art, music, love, a little travel, a pleasant walk, a good dinner, Darryl's apple pie, friends. But I have no illusion that everything will be OK. So, as I said above, here are some photographs from our stay at Cloudland Canyon: the joy of nature.
Starr's new Home.
Darryl's
Apple Pie
