Category Archives: Contemplations

Whose Lives Matter?

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While walking past a bus stop yesterday, I saw a person with a red T-shirt and a jacket. The jacket covered some of the letters of the message on the shirt, but I could read … Lives Matter. The first word was not “Black,” so I paused and asked about the missing word. Turned out to be “Deplorable.” I smiled, because I really liked the sentiment, but I also smiled because the person was a middling aged and middling sized black man who was also wearing a MAGA hat. 

We chatted briefly, agreeing that “Deplorable” is a wretched word for a huge section of our voting population. His words: “It’s so disrespectful.” Yes, I said, and we wished each other a good day and parted company. 

If you heard Hillary refer to the small “basket of deplorables” back in 2016, you will know that she was referring to a small group of people who were engineering Trump’s campaign. She was trying to convey that millions of his supporters were being duped, that they were being seriously misled. I happen to believe that she was right about that.

But I also believe that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have paid sufficient attention to our struggling working class. Thus when the Republicans seized the opportunity to push the narrative that Hillary considered all of Trump’s followers to be deplorable, it was too easy for millions to believe it. 

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about my fear that the word “deplorable” could bring about the end of the Enlightenment. Since then, one thing has led to another, and here we are facing an election that could actually bring about the end of the Enlightenment. What’s odd is that I would wear a T-shirt proclaiming, “Deplorable Lives Matter” today. I am that concerned about the disrespect that is heaped on people who are not on board with the furthest reaches of the progressive Democrats. 

I’m a centrist who believes in incremental reform based on what we’ve learned from past reforms. I’m not on board with the extreme left or the extreme right. Millions of people are like me, but we don’t control the media. So we struggle to be heard. To progressives, I’m deplorable. To the extreme right, I’m unprincipled, never mind the fact that the far right has no principles at all today. 

I no longer consider myself a Democrat. Yet I want the Dems to hold the House and win a couple more Senate seats, and I want moderate Dems to be in the majority of their caucuses, and I want the progressives to rethink everything. And I desperately want the Dems to find a way to win over the deplorables who think the Dems disrespect them all. 

I urge you to read any and all things written by Ruy Teixeira on his substack: The Liberal Patriot. 

If you can’t spend an entire weekend reading his articles, read at least this one: The Democrats’ Common Sense Problem.

Contemplating Spring

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Camping in the Rain! Yes!

Over the years, we have backpacked, car-camped in vans, car-camped with tents – we have a lot of experience. But we met our match this week with a new tent that is designed to snuggle up to an SUV. A year ago, we had a small camper van that worked fine for me, but it just couldn’t handle the backroads that my husband loves to travel. He will follow a gravel road with huge potholes and muddy ruts to the end of the earth. Evan better if there is snow ahead. So we traded this year for a Subaru designed with him in mind. 

But it’s hard to carry much gear and still sleep in the car, so we bought this special tent that is supposed to fit around the rear end of an SUV. And maybe it would have, but we absolutely could not fit the center pole into its little pockets no matter what we tried. And without the center pole, the two sides of the tent would not stand up. So we never really got to the part about snugging it up around the rear of our vehicle. 

After about two hours of NOT YELLING! at each other, the smarter one of us said, calmly, “I’d like to toss this tent into the back of the car and go sleep in our own beds tonight.” “Brilliant,” said I, and home we went. We have another tent, a small two-person tent (having given away a perfectly good 4-person tent when we bought the van that we have now traded for the Subaru), so the next morning we headed out with the little tent. We set it up in a flash, then set off to visit friends for the afternoon. It rained while we were visiting, but when we got back to our tent, we did our nightly rituals and crawled in while the rain took a break.

We had purchased new sleeping mats with the SUV tent, and they were great. I kept my socks on, used a sleeping bag liner, and was warm and comfy. Unlike many nights camping out, I actually slept some – when I wasn’t listening to some serious rain hitting our rain fly. All seemed well, until we woke up in the morning and discovered that while the rain fly did its job, the sides and floor of our tent seemed to have no resistance at all to the rain. Mats wet. Sleeping bags wet. Ugh. Never mind. We smiled at each other and said, “I’m having fun!”  And we were. 

So now, if we can ever get the SUV tent back into the bag it came in, we will return it and think about our options. I actually found the receipt for it today! How often does that happen when a purchase doesn’t work out. Check back for camping updates later this spring.

Green!

One benefit of giving up on our tent and returning home is that we got to view spring unfolding twice along our drive. The shades of green as shrubs and trees work their springtime magic are glorious. Absolutely not monochromatic. I’m grateful that I can see colors. 

When we lived in Skagit County, my weekly travels along Highway 20 gave me the opportunity to see native plants come alive in their orderly sequence each year, Indian plum, red flowering current, red elderberry, salmonberry, dogwood. Many of them were visible on this trip to Island County, while the early greens of the emerging shrub and tree leaves provided the background. 

Our view from our apartment is of buildings, so a periodic drive through the countryside is essential for my mental health. I need to “touch grass” as the saying goes today.