A Letter in Spring

It is March 3, 2021, here in my corner of southeast Michigan, the Great Lake State. It’s been sunny and windy these last few days: 15-20 mph, gusts to 30. March has come in like a lion, albeit one with sunshine over its shoulder. This odd predilection for leaning on fauna for assistance with our weather prediction is problematic. Groundhogs on February 2nd notwithstanding, I am doubtful that one’s adoption of animals leonine and ovine to guide meteorological prognostication is useful. I speak as a man with a degree in zoology

It snowed like the dickens for two weeks in the middle of February. Odd, because for the last ten years or so, significant snow here at the 43rd parallel has been rare. How much snow did we receive? Our pup is a Portuguese Podengo. She is about one foot tall at the shoulder. I had to dig an exercise route for her. As a hound, she becomes testy if denied her daily exercise of defending the yard from the squirrel incursions. The snow depth measured 14 inches. As she sprinted on her track, you could see canine puffs of breath, but no dog.

Not that shoveling for my dog is a bad thing. It was a perfect winter’s day: a bluebird sky that required sunglasses, dead calm, barely a cloud overhead, and 24 F temps. I put on my heart rate monitor, and set to work. 64 minutes later, I had a trail 30 yards long, from deck to shed, and a 10 yard circumference on snow-free deck as wall for her use. Average heart rate of 144 beats per minute. Max HR of 162. 992 calories burned. Yes, it went into my daily training journal exactly like that.

I like snow. I don’t particularly love Frostbite Falls cold. Two years ago, local students had a week of days off, not because of snow, but because with temperatures reaching just the single digit negative numbers for highs, it was deemed unsafe for them to be standing for 20 minutes at the bus stops.

It probably was. You have to look at things objectively. Kids who get themselves up and ready for school do not like to wear coats. Teenagers and pre-teens have never liked to wear coats in winter. If Greece in the time of Socrates had a snowy winter, we would surely have heard about it from Socrates via Plato.

The Children now love luxury; they have bad manners,

contempt for authority, they refuse to dress themselves

properly for the inclement weather.

Yet, at this moment, 9 days after my aerobic shoveling activity, we’ve experienced a significant reversal. On Saturday, it was 50 F and gloomy. Snow melted. On Sunday, it was 58F, sunny, and even more snow melted. Today, as this is written at 12:00 EST, it is 36F, sunny, and the winds are rattling the windows with gusts of 30 mph. The only snow left are the piles I made when I shoveled the running trail for Millie.

Ah, yes, EST. We are on Eastern Standard Time for another two weeks. It has been decided that on 2:00 am of Sunday, March 14, it will be in everyone’s best interests if we “Spring Ahead” with our clocks and instantly, adopt the time convention of 3:00 am. For the next 8 months, we will ‘save’ daylight. Of course, for the next month or so, it will once again be dark until 8:15 am and it will be sunny until 7:30, and yes, I understand that those times will shift around one minute per day and yes, time is an entirely human-made convention that matters very little in a universal sense, but I am still perplexed.

On whose watch was it determined that PM sun is better than AM sun? After a month of sunny morning commutes, for those who must leave home for work, they will once again be plunged into darkness. I’ve heard the argument put forth that we use less energy during DST months. I can’t find consistent data on the subject, and if you have, please don’t share it as I don’t care all that much and won’t bother to read it. Yet I will say that most folks I know turn on plenty of lights, use their computers, charge their cars and devices, cook their meals, make their coffee, and all sundry manner of morning activities come sun or darkness; EST or EDT.

Last time I asked around, those activities take place in the evening as well, with perhaps a downturn in household lighting. Your mileage may vary.

No one can save daylight. Capacitors can store electricity (all hail von Kleist and Musschenbroek. HAIL!) but nobody has extra daylight stored up in a vacu-sealed plastic bag in their pantry. At best, we can rearrange daylight.

It’s like re-organizing the socks and underwear drawer. You can shove the boxers over there to make some space for the bulky winter rag-wool socks, but in the early morning dark of the first month of Daylight Saving Time, you’re likely to pull out 3 pairs of now tightly wadded up tighty-whities when you really wanted the jalapeno pepper boxer-briefs. When it comes to morning clock management, as with the bits that dangle outside the human torso, we all need proper support.

These days, we need all the support we can get. From November 3, 2020 until, well, now, our nation’s democracy has been under assault. If you don’t see these past four months as the equivalent of the 1820 Missouri Compromise alarm bells, you’re not paying attention.

Make no mistake – the insurgency of January 6th, the entire GOP ideology of the last four years, has been about the creation of a white man’s America. Every despicable act I have seen since 2016 has been the result of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and a whole host of other “-isms” based in hate and evil.

Not since the era of poll taxes and tests has one political party tried so hard to suppress the fairly held election rights of people of color. Study after study shows that voter fraud in our country is nearly non-existent. Yet, the GOP beats that drum like a marching band on a Football Saturday afternoon.

Ah, yes. Voter suppression. According to the Brennan Center, as of February 19,2021, 43 states have bills carried over, pre-filed, or introduced with provisions that restrict voting access. Of course, there have also been bills introduced to expand voting access, but the fact that citizens in 86% of our States see fit to make it more difficult to vote shouts loudly about the difficulties that lie ahead for inclusion, diversity, and basic human decency. Those issues surrounding voter fraud? Well, they’re false. It’s a lie. In 2016, the Washington Post found only 4 cases of genuine voter fraud.

It’s been a long time since the US has had a president, indeed, an entire political party, so closely allied with white supremacists and nationalists. Who can forget “There are very fine people on both sides” and the ever-popular and prescient “Stand back and stand by?” You would have to go back to the anti-Semitic WWII non-interventionists of the late 1930s to find such high-level concordance with such low-level beliefs.

A common thread of conversation since WWII was “How did the German people let the Nazis rise to power? Why did so many Italians fall in love with Mussolini?” If you’ve been paying attention since 2016, and especially since Nov. 3, now you know.

I hear, loudly and frequently, from people who refuse to do a public good as simple as the wearing of a cloth mask rant about “My Freedoms.” Yet, those are the same people who back this rise to fascism. I don’t think they have a good grasp on the concept of freedom under fascism. Perplexing, eh?

It gets worse. We now have the data which shows that Covid_19 has hit BIPOC far harder than white America. We also have data to demonstrate masks work. Yet in Texas and Mississippi, we now have governors who have ended the mask mandate. Yes, politicians in those states know more about epidemiology and virology and pulmonology that those who have dedicated their lives to the sciences. What will be the upshot of all those people no longer tethered to a mask? Thousands of people will die needlessly. And what will be the skin color of most of the dead? That’s one heckuva of voter suppression plan.

Since the time of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese, disinformation has been a coin of the realm. Most notably, Goebbels is credited with “Tell a lie, make it big, repeat it often, and people will believe you.” Sounds a lot like the “Stolen, Rigged Election” horse hockey we’ve heard from the ex-president since before the election was even held.

A quote often wrongly attributed to Sinclair Lewis says “when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and dragging a cross.” Eugene Debs said, “Every oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both.” Accurate to the ten-thousandth of an inch.

We claim “Give me your tired, your poor” and yet, children were ripped from the arms of their parents and put in concentration camps by these same faux-christians who are told “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” A faith of love and kindness has been bastardized by those who drag the cross. If Jesus were to return to Earth, I’m pretty sure he’d be plenty ticked at the way his name was abused. There would be some Old Testament smiting of peoples going on, and I know where it would start.

Our flag has been warped. Those who scream most loudly about patriotism are those least concerned with the patriotic and democratic ideals of our nation. As Shakespeare said, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

I happened to catch a few minutes of the CPAC convention. That is the convention where self-proclaimed conservatives pat themselves on their backs for their hate-fueled views and loudly declaim that the GOP will rise again. The stage was in the shape of a Nazi SS logo, the Odal Rune. When called on it, the organizers said, “No way, we didn’t even see that” but no apology was forthcoming. Interesting, too, that they didn’t mistakenly construct a stage in the shape of a peace sign, or a Star of David.

There was also a golden calf, er, statue, of president 45. Yes, a golden statue. I read it was available for a donation of $100,000. Clearly, the GOP must not have read Torah or Old Testament. That whole Golden Calf thing? It didn’t go over all that well with the Big Guy (Exodus 32:4-14).

January 6th – a rabid group of US citizens, incited to fury by a fairly un-elected president, take up arms against the US. Call it a coup, an insurrection, an insurgency; whatever phrase you use, it was terrorism and treason. The fairly elected officials of our government were in mortal danger. The past vice-president of the US, a man known for his spineless fealty to his ex-president, was in mortal danger.

People were assaulted. People were murdered. It was perhaps the worst day in the US since the Civil War. Yes, worse than 9/11. While 2,977 innocent people died on that day, they were murdered by outside forces, a foreign government that sought to sow terror into the US. On January 6th, the terrorist attacks were carried out by citizens of our own country.

Those who seek to create a white nationalist American state are not going away. January 6, 2021 was not the end. It was the beginning.

We have been warned. Lives have been lost. The rhetoric and violence will ratchet upwards. It will not be easy. Yet, we can see the danger: from neo-nazis, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, the ex-president, his henchmen and enablers and apologist and minions.

I am certain more lives will be lost. On April 26th, 1995, Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building was bombed. 168 were killed, including 19 children. Here we are, 26 years later, and I am sad to say, this will happen again. Terrorists, domestic or foreign, are no respecters of human life.

Yet, I remain optimistic. A colleague once described me as “relentlessly optimistic.” I echo Theodore Parker, from the 1850s,

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one,

my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete

the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And

from what I see, I am sure it bends towards justice.

I believe that there are enough good and vigilant people out there who are fed up: angry and disgusted at hate and evil and egomaniacism and narcissism, who will continue to fight for the greater good of all against the angry assaults of xenophobic seditionist miscreants. The fight will run on, years certainly, until we can recite with Whitman:

O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sough is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But we will sing Whitman’s song.

Here at my desk in the unheated sunroom of my home, I can look out the windows and see my small corner of the world. The world is as small as our galaxy; as large as the universe within a single atom. The squirrels, fat in October, have a lean and hungry look in early March. There are a few purple and white blooms pushing up through mulch and snow. Out on the driveway, snow that melted in the late afternoon snow has formed skating rinks the size of cafeteria trays and the sun bounces off them like small mirrors. Our old magnolia tree, its trunk on the west side of the fence with most of its limbs on the east, is thinking about pushing out a few buds.

My gaze shifts to the floor beside my desk; my pup Millie, newly diagnosed with macular degeneration and losing her sight, basks blissfully in her sunbeam; 42F outside, it feels 30 degrees warmer than that as I pass my hand through the sun’s dust-filled rays.

Dread is contagious. Put a mask on your psyche. Keep the angst away. There is a shield within your heart, your DNA. As I wrote in my Sonnet No. 71-the bleak times:

You saddle your courage, get on the horse,

Ride through the terrors and darkness of heart.

Dug in, you confront your dread with sheer force.

You harness your strength, let plan your fresh start.

Dawns always rise, our souls victorious,

In sunshine fresh, conscience is glorious.

We must be vigilant. We must act. Don’t forget Edmond Burke: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Yet, be an optimist. It is spring.