Wintering

I’m listening this morning to Lucinda Williams whose songs are seldom light and cheerful. Never, or nearly never, do they suggest that life’s an unalloyed blessing, free of nagging sadness, disappointments, screw ups. And yet, I find still them comforting. On a similar, but different register, I just finished reading, “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times,” written by Katherine May.
 
Wintering, in May’s personal memoir, is both a season and metaphor, signaling a transition – a liminal period – from sunny and frenetic to slower and darker days during which we can, if we so choose, slow down, withdraw, and explore our sadness, sometimes depression and defeat. On its face, not much fun. But, thankfully, wintering can be more than retreat, despair and pain. It is also a time, May writes, probably the most propitious time, if seized, for sober personal reflection and renewal.
 
That resonates with me. My life from an early age looks nothing like an ascending line, moving from one success to another, from one great time to another. I have wintered more than once, either out of choice or dire necessity, and am better for it. All of which has made me suspicious of people who, when I ask, “How are you” unfailingly reply “Life couldn’t be better. Everything is great!” On such occasions, I can’t help but think to myself – really?
 
This pressure to present oneself as occupying at all times the “sunny side of the street” is, in my experience, unhealthy. It closes up the mental space that allows us to confront and absorb life’s inevitable heartaches and disappointments. And, in doing so, forecloses the possibility of coming out of our “wintering” on new, healthier, and higher ground.

 

Much hangs on this struggle

The latest, patently racist, and arguably the most dangerous assault on voting rights in the past 100 years moves from Georgia to Texas. Much hangs on the outcome of this struggle, indeed what our country will look like for decades to come.

Political devolution

Someone should write an expose of Lindsey Graham’s political devolution. Done right, it would reveal not only the crass opportunism of Graham in some detail, but also the tentacles and power of the far flung network of right wing extremism to drag people and politicians into its orbit

A fool errand

The contrasting of Biden to Obama, something that I have observed recently, is a fool’s errand if done outside of the concrete conditions in which Biden governs and Obama governed. The differences in conditions and circumstances between one presidency and the other are differences of kind, not degree. In other words, the hand dealt to Obama a decade of so ago is very different, qualitatively different, than the hand that Biden draws from now. Only by taking into account those differences can any evaluation between the two presidencies be made if one wants to go there.

One unspeakable tragedy after another

When Congressional Republicans sat on their hands and did nothing when 20 children between the ages of six and seven were slaughtered at Sandy Hook school by a young disturbed man wielding an assault weapon, I concluded that they would never do anything to support gun control legislation.

And yet each time the lives of innocent people are violently stolen from them by someone with an assault weapon, as happened once again in Atlanta and Boulder in the past week, I make the mistake of thinking that this time is different, that a bridge too far has been finally crossed and Congressional Republicans will reconsider their positions and do the right thing. But invariably I’m wrong.
On
Instead of supporting a ban on assault weapons and other gun control measures, what I and what tens of millions hear is the same old speeches and soundbites from them to justify doing nothing in the face of one unspeakable tragedy after another.

Seems to me that if 60 votes supporting such action can’t be found in the Senate this time, isn’t it time to do away with the filibuster and do what a vast majority of the American people want done?