NoNewsFromHere: HERE ON MARS

[A rant]

Metaphor?: A tree found its way to survive; if one direction doesn't work, try another.

I lied. Not exactly on Mars, but sometimes it feels like it, being at a safe remove–for now– from events that explode through the media almost hourly. It’s so exhausting I’ve become inured. Every day thirty or forty emails pile up begging for help for the desperate, the endangered, the forgotten, or to fight yet another horror. How has it come to this?

[Irrelevant photos included to lighten things up.]

A deliberate burn on the field across the road

Life on earth wasn’t always like this. Shootings have become a common expression of anger, sometimes racial, sometimes personal, always deadly. With guns close to hand it’s easy to let loose. I have been learning that shootings can happen anywhere, at any time, and to anyone. And in our physical universe, with increasing and frightening frequency, sections of our country are crazy with fire while others are battered again and again by tornados, and yet another town nearly drowns under unexpected deluges. The victims of much of this social and physical disorder are–big surprise–the poorest among us. But hey, if you’re not poor, you’re okay, aren’t you?

An amazing dragonfly (swamp darner) that appeared by the front door and stayed long enough to have its picture taken.

One morning hundreds of these appeared on the lawn. Not spider webs, but "dollar spot fungus" that disappeared as the dew dried.

I hear almost nothing about the kind of country Trump and his ilk and his supporters would like to live in. I only hear about what they don’t want.

But what exactly is their vision of society?

Has it been given serious thought, beyond attempts to be rid of what they don’t like? Have they imagined a perfect society, and taken lessons from history? (In Trump’s case, that’s a “no.”) Imagine the kind of country this would be if current directions continued, unhampered. The federal government would be hobbled. Made small. The social contract, the bargain society made with government in the first place to provide order and–one hopes–justice, could turn into something more along the lines of, say, a pre-nup. We, the people, could opt in to what we like, opt out of what we don’t. Freedom! (Why, for example, fund public education if you’re not going to use it yourself? Why fund anything you're not going to use yourself? What good are immigrants to me? Why should I pay taxes to support people who can’t support themselves? Why should I feed the hungry? Let ‘em eat cake! Blah, blah, blah.) White people would have an improved kind of largesse–free to be whatever they/we wanted to be, although–caveat–the wealthy would naturally be the ones to fully reap the benefits befitting an elite among elites. (History demonstrates how well white people have ruled the world to date, hasn’t it? We fuck up in classy ways that make history reading fun!) As for health care, it would remain non-existent for the many but, hey, it would be a choice, and choices are good. The quality of our rivers, lakes and air would be degraded, but not everywhere, of course, and you can picture the likeliest locations. Far away. Free enterprise could be relieved of its remaining chains. (We could return to the early days of the industrial age, freedom-wise. Child labor, anyone?)

The first mowing of the season, early this time.

Yield: 41 bales

Here, then, is my respite. From this angle, nothing looks different to me. It’s a stretch, but I could pretend I’m on Mars. That is, if I wasn’t aware in print and electronic media of what was going on out there. In reality, I eat it up. It’s the I-can’t-look-away syndrome, as applied to a train wreck. I often think about how Ken missed this horrific time, leaving this planet only days before the November 2016 elections. (What would he have thought of a president, the Leader of our Country–a guy without a moral compass who denigrates others, sows hatred, thinks of himself before anyone or anything including the country over which he presides, a creature ignorant of history, of science, a foul womanizer, a stupendous liar, and, alas, a guy who can’t even spell. And lacking taste, too: In his New York City days he was called the “Liberace of developers.” Hah!) I know very well what Ken would have thought.

I can almost hear him. But I know the road to where we are now was already laid before 2016, and we were already traveling it even before the election. We weren’t sure it would lead us to this.