Tag: politics
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Notes from a Pandemic
When I was a child, the first time I realized that the comforting routines of daily life were capable of perturbation was during the oil embargo of the 1970s. My father’s avid planning of weekend trips came to an abrupt halt, as did my brothers’ borrowing of the family car. I was occasionally dragged out on an…
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The State of the State
The year in politics, for me at least, has been largely a year of breathlessness and angst. I cancelled my subscription to the Atlantic because I couldn’t read One More Article about Donald Trump. At some point the endless drumbeat of the damage that he’s causing to the environment, to civil rights, to our international standing (with…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of 2019
– This time two years ago I was curled in a chair with my laptop watching an angry sea in San Simeon. I planned to return this month, though according to the forecast the ocean would be placid and the skies blue. But a year of too much travel and a bout of post-Christmas illness…
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Speaking Freely
Provocateur Alex Jones’ ongoing rampage across social media recently encountered at least a speed bump and perhaps a cliff as Spotify, Apple, Google, Facebook and – when he tried to use it as a last-ditch refuge, Vimeo – purged the bulk of his content from their sites (in addition, as I was writing this, Twitter…
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what you made me feel
the fortune teller On high school graduation day a teacher asked me to stay after class. He sat me down, and took my hand, and said, “I want to tell you your fortune.” I looked at him expectantly. “So high school is over, and you didn’t go to prom, and you weren’t a popular girl.…
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Back in Big Sur
On Friday the 13th, Big Sur rejoined the world. After a winter that saw the region drenched with over 100 inches of rain, massive slides along the always precarious Highway 1 blocked the road to the south just past Ragged Point and so severely destabilized the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge to the north that it had…
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Unbelieving
I was about six the first time it dawned on me to ask my fifteen-year-old brother who the man on a stick he wore so conspicuously around his neck was. This was before the phrase “personal savior” had entered the public lexicon, so he explained to me the long way around that Jesus was a…
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Charlottesville
About this time last year I was wrestling with, in the words I used at the time, “why the message of tolerance still isn’t getting through to some people who might be receptive of it, and what those of us who believe in it can do to proselytize better.” What a difference a year makes.…
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What I Hate
This is a thing that has been making the rounds on Facebook among some people that I know: The Democrat [sic] Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of the New Year
– I am snug in an ocean side room near Cambria. The rain that had been slanting sideways has dwindled to little more than a drizzle, and though the sea and the sky meet in a soft, unbroken expanse the seagulls are emerging from their huddles onshore and drifting past to remind me that I…
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