(I’m a little slow to get back aboard in here. I realize it and I’m trying to fight my way back. We’ve had some difficult family issues of the sort that are not helpful to one's writing output. Nevertheless, I persist. Bear with me.) *

* EJS Downs 1

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California has been in the news a lot lately mostly for the wrong reasons, in the fastidious judgement of the perverts and reprobates in dubious authority currently in our befuddled country. I can vividly remember when it was a very different story. As an honest-to-goodness “baby boomer”, I was born into a different world than most of you. Books have been written on these generational divides, but don’t worry; I have no intention of doing that. I’m just going to explore a single song from 1966 to take us into a wormhole of sorts to both a distant past, and perhaps toward a better future:

California Dreamin' 🎸 (link)

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As soon as I hear the first notes of this iconic song, I’m back in my senior year in high school on my way to the Kentucky State High School Basketball tournament in Louisville; WAKY on the radio and a group of teenage high school friends heading up I-64 on a mid-week afternoon. I’m not there in merely some sense of fuzzy nostalgia. That’s exactly where I am; We’re past Winchester and about ten miles east of Lexington. We can hardly wait to get there.

School is close to being out (in fact, I went to the 60-year reunion of my senior class just the other day). The basketball tournament is a state-wide cultural event 🏀. If you can believe it, I was a respectable player myself in those days. The tournament is always full of excitement and surprises (on and off the court). On this beautiful day, the future looks bright and dazzling. As far as the eye can see, there’s no premonition that there will ever be any wrong turns.

We’re eating-up road: Not only to Louisville, but as the vanguard of the golden generation roaring out of our small-town driveways to a golden future. We’re going all the way for sure: college, a life in the glory of the open road; nothing to be forbidden or denied.

This is the very song I hear in my head today when I reimagine that youthful attitude. It was a wonderful sensation. I feel genuinely sorry for those among you who haven’t experienced it that way.

Just as we were the golden generation (and we somehow knew that we were exactly that…sorry), the golden nation-state of California was beginning to take flight in our imaginations. It was just starting to turn from being an interesting and faraway geographic location, into a sun-drenched state of-mind and a trailblazer on the cusp of a new and exotic future.

John Wooden at UCLA had created the first couple of what would eventually be ten national championships in NCAA major-college basketball (that mattered to those of us in Kentucky). The theatrics of UCLA basketball became as something from another world: Color TV, Hollywood glamor, eye-catching blonde cheerleaders and players out of central casting, one juggernaut team after another.

Then there were the beaches and the surfers and the rest of the music and the entire frantic, edgy panoply of what was becoming a sometimes-zany futuristic concept that would dominate our culture for years to come.

The rest of us had no chance. Even the past glories of UK basketball began to look obsolete and faded in this supercharged new environment. The great eastern cities appeared melancholy, bleak, and threatening (so “yesterday” 🙄) in comparison.

We were to be spared the arrival of the so-called “New South” (same as the old South, pretty much🙁) for a decade or two yet (we had that mercy as well). Vietnam loomed, but it was a little early for those of us with college privilege to be concerned. It was a brief perfect storm of hopes and possibilities.

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My mother had three surviving adult sisters. All had been born in Kentucky but had moved around to other places as my late grandfather worked as an electrician in the WPA. They lived in Florida for a while. The youngest sister married in Cincinnati and later relocated with her husband to New Jersey and then to Maryland. The two oldest sisters also married in Ohio and relocated with their families to California in the 1950s to join the booming aerospace industry.

My mom stayed home and came to reside in Mount Sterling, KY with my father. ((As an aside, my dad’s only surviving sister also relocated with her husband (a GE executive originally from Kentucky). They went on to live all over the country and the world before eventually settling in Syracuse, NY)).

My family were the stay-at-homes who took on the role of the familial anchors. We represented home to a vaguely uprooted and dispersed family diaspora (in certain symbolic ways, we still do). We were the ones waiting when they came home for visits. We were the touchstones and the keepers of family institutions.

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My cousins were objects of benign local curiosity. As urban trendsetters each in their own way, they appeared a little exotic to my small-town mid-south cultural environment. We were in the same rough age-segment (all ‘boomers’). They had “…been around…” as the saying still goes (sometimes they weren’t above letting you know it in small, innocent ways 😉). But I think they enjoyed their time with us and may have even been slightly envious of our comparatively innocent, idyllic small-town childhoods. I think we all got along well, and they were well-accepted by my local friends. We’ve enjoyed periodic lifetime relationships with my eastern cousins.

In our teenage years, one branch of my California cousins visited us in Mount Sterling once (we rarely saw the other one for many years due to health issues in the family). As I recall, on their last full family visit (1963 maybe?), they arrived with a large airstream-style trailer and parked it in our back yard on Sycamore Street. That in itself was something we didn’t see every day in Mount Sterling 😮.

‘Looks’ had always run in Mom’s family. She and all her sisters were all photogenically attractive. For some reason, the western family had mostly female children. They inherited the same traits. And something else as well.

They were born and raised in California! When my three or four (exact numbers and even names are a bit vague today. It’s been a long time🤔) cousins walked out of the trailer, it was immediately clear to all that they were…well…different. They had that same casual California bearing and style that was just short of becoming universal. And here it was, right here in our leafy summertime backyard in little ole’ Mount Sterling KY! We could not have been more surprised if aliens had stepped from a spaceship.

I don’t want to imply that they caused any unusual uproar around our close-knit little neighborhood. I’ll only say this, and it’s something my late brother and I used to talk about: We never knew we had so many young friends as during that magic summertime week. Virtually all of them (and even some we didn’t know all that well) found a reason to show-up at our house. We had never been so popular before, and we never would be again. 😉

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I never made it out there 🙁. I always wanted to, but the planets never aligned. It remains a figment of my long-ago imagination (maybe that’s for the best). My aunts, uncles, and some cousins would continue sporadic trips to Kentucky over the years but we were all much older by then. Obligations and time had begun to weigh. The early stark differences had merged into each other.

But I still think of those early scenes when I think of California. I think of what opportunities for optimism there might be in the lessons of those early faraway and unafraid days. We owned the future and nobody was going to steal it from us, try as they might. Just maybe it’s time to take that future back again (?) 🙂

California Dreamin’ 🎹

It’s played in my consciousness for a while now that I need to do a story about my father and our early years. I’ve put it off more than once. I think my family deserves its due in the sometimes-stormy private lives we lived, but one must be careful: Several are no longer living. They deserve discretion and a degree of privacy. I guess it falls to me to complete the record as best I can and as honestly and as honorably as I can. We actually did play an important and too-rarely acknowledged role in the history of my hometown. It’s not something I want to do and I’m not entirely sure it’s something I can do, but I have to try.

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One of my life’s happiest memories came on Christmas Eve in the mid 1950’s. I was about nine years old. It’s maybe thirty seconds long in my actual memory (Forgive me to my larger audience. I’m going to get into some local knowledge here about Mount Sterling, KY): I recall as if it were yesterday walking with my dad on the right side of the street, westward on West Main Street somewhere near Saint Patrick’s Church (presumably toward our car parked on Main or maybe on Sycamore Street (?). I lose track of this part).

I was on the inside, and he was walking to my left. It was a crisp, quiet, magical Christmas Eve night; dark and chilly with a mild sharp snow falling. The street was slightly glistening and nearly empty. My feet were barely touching the ground anyway, because we had just left Gay’s Sporting Goods (in the block where the Traditional Bank is today) and I was carrying a brand-new Wilson Nellie Fox baseball glove: top-of-the-line equipment for those days, as good as what they used in the big leagues. I would use it for years to come.

That was a great memory then and to this day it so remains. It’s a frozen fragment in my mind long after more recent and presumably more important memories have disappeared. It was also before the skies began to darken, in a child’s time when everything was innocent and wonderful.

It’s noteworthy how the really happy memories last the longest and burn the deepest. Could it be because there are so few of them in an ordinary life? 🙂

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My dad and I had a complex relationship. It had elements of the cliche’ Norman Rockwell small-town parent/child interplay, but there were other parts to it as well. My dad had a ‘country’ background. He was raised early-on in an adjacent county at the fringe of the Appalachian foothills. Even being right next door, it was as different from our small town as night from day. He carried simple (not simplistic) ideas gleaned from that early experience over most of his life. In spite of my best efforts otherwise, I would carry things from there as well.

He could be nearly overbearingly kind and sentimental. He was easily wounded and quick to take offense. He never attended college. He maintained a house-painting and small contracting business. He was an expert (seriously) at automotive radiator and small engine repairs (I somehow picked-up a very small portion of his handyman skills). He was a classic, outgoing ‘live by your wits’ type who understood networking before there was a name for it. I suppose this is true of many people, but it seemed to me he was more popular out in the community than he was at home (“A prophet without honor…” etc.).

I was different. My brother (and later, my sister) and I were basically ‘city’ kids (at least to the extent that was possible in 1950’s Mount Sterling😉). We had a harder and more cynical edge that was completely foreign to my dad (more like my mom; another story). Even in those early days, I was a reader and thinker, and something of a dreamer. I know my father loved us all (we certainly loved him in our way), but I don’t think he understood any of us beyond a certain point. We had landed in places he could not go.

I had many wealthy young friends with prominent names and public status. It seemed nearly everyone I knew was the child of a banker, landowner, doctor, lawyer, or executive business owner. My father could at times seem narrow and parochial to me in that context. I dislike admitting this even today, but there were times I felt somehow beneath the neighborhood situation I had inherited (Sometimes I still do. Some things stay with you). I took from it a kind of outsider’s mentality that I’ve never entirely left behind.

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If there was a unifying thread in those early family days, it was baseball. This won’t surprise anyone who’s read my previous work. I’ve scattered stories and photos around (all true!) that make this connection clear (I’ve also got a few old photos on Instagram and on my Facebook page that go some way to expand upon this theme). My dad was a past local baseball hero who had entertained major-league possibilities at one time.

In the 1950’s baseball was still the game. Football and basketball were making themselves felt, but they had yet to completely arrive. Baseball seemed to have been invented entirely for the purpose of encapsulating outdoor small-town community recreational life. We played every major sport in its season, but baseball was the first one to broadly and democratically matter. No young man’s childhood was complete without at least one trip three hours north (faster today) to watch the Cincinnati Reds at Crosley Field.

The World Series in October was a unique event in each year’s calendar. All unnecessary activity came to a stop. It was followed pitch-by-pitch on radio (and early mostly-b/w TV) all over the country by people on their jobs or at home or even in their cars. It’s hard today to imagine any single event that could draw as much focused attention. Like baseball itself, the series was a point of intense social cohesion in our community and in all communities. Baseball wasn’t called “the national pastime” for nothing.

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Both my parents were an important part of baseball at the American Legion Park for as long as I can remember (before that, it was the old Fairgrounds Park east of town). Mom stocked and worked the concession stand (not alone; there were many other helpful contributors on a rotating basis). Dad tended the grounds, ‘dragged’ and lined the fields, installed the bases, and generally prepared for games.

When he was coaching, he would sometimes buy baseball equipment for our teammates and do other small good deeds. I can remember (no exaggeration) our 1948 Plymouth so full of ballplayers back-and-forth from the park that you could hardly close the doors. I’ve had several people over the years tell me what a good influence he had been to them in our younger years, and how much they appreciated it. He was regarded as a patient and very good teacher of the game.

Mount Sterling had its own independent amateur team in those days for adult men, and we also had a so-called ‘Pony League’ for players just past Little League age. Church league softball was a popular pastime. There was a lot happening in the baseball world at Legion Park, and my dad (and indirectly, me and my brother and my mom) were part of it all. Dad coached at different times at three separate levels.

If a little league game was scheduled, it was necessary to install the temporary outfield fence (it asked too much of 6th graders to hit 300-foot home runs). At first, this ‘fence’ was literally chicken-wire anchored at intervals with posts secured in paint-buckets weighted with concrete. Later, we graduated to a decent picket fence that rolled up like bales of hay when it was time to put it away.

I’m sure he had help on various occasions, but I can recall a fair number of times that he and I were the only two there while this was happening (later on, my younger brother helped out as well). At that time, I felt more at home at the ballpark than I did at home (I spent nearly as much time there). That was a context in which I genuinely looked-up to my father in a way I was not always able to otherwise do. Like me, he also seemed at home there in a way that wasn’t always true at our actual home. There are scattered bits and pieces of good memories there as well.

When I began to actually play organized baseball at about eight years of age, it was just childish good fun at first. I was just an ordinary kid stumbling awkwardly to learn new motor skills and the mechanics and tactics of the game.

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I realized early-on that I was a good fielder. I had good instincts and range, and I could really catch the ball wherever I found it. I played mostly infield, but I had experience at all positions. Because I lacked a strong throwing-arm, second base became my natural position.

All was well for a year or so, but it began to become obvious to everyone (mostly to me) that I wasn’t a very good hitter. Little League pitching distance is only forty-six feet. Many overgrown pitchers at age twelve can throw hard and not always accurately (The fact is, your team is going to rise or fall at that level on the strength of your pitcher. He’s often your best overall athlete, and nothing else is going to matter nearly as much to a game’s outcome). I found it intimidating and hard to react.

No son of my baseball-hero father was going to be a poor hitter if it could be helped. I began to press and worry, and that just made everything worse. I lost all sense of the strike zone. The more nervous and indecisive I got, the worse my at-bats became. It was only a matter of time before the post-game home kitchen-table seminars started, and that was when the first grey clouds became visible on an otherwise-sunny horizon.

I spent more than a few nights sitting there nearly in tears when dad would lecture and critique my effort (not violently to be sure, but firmly and leaving no doubt in my mind that I was a disappointment to the family name). My mom didn’t like it. It was just about the first time I saw them in open disagreement about anything (It wouldn’t be the last by a longshot). Naturally, my apprehensions only grew, and I went from bad to worse. I think in looking back now that the anxiety issues and the persistent unease that have trailed me for much of my adult life started there. This was a part of our curated family life that the larger community never saw (There would be others later).

I gradually got a little better as I got older, but I was never an outstanding Little League hitter. I think I hit about .250 in my final championship year (I’m #19 in the photo above. My brother Rick is #31. My dad is to the left). year. I only got more comfortable when I got to Pony League and the pitcher moved back by eight feet. I batted .321 in my last year of organized baseball. That’s not great for a good Pony League hitter, but it ain’t bad.

But some wounds never entirely heal (‘Ball glove night’ was pretty far in the rearview mirror). 1962 was my last participation in baseball. Other than the occasional softball game at college or later, I never played again. We all went on to other things. The storm was almost overhead now, where it would remain in fits and starts for the next 35 years. We would still have our good moments in the lulls. That’s for another time, or maybe for never.

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My parents bookended 1998 with their passing. My brother died in 2015. Rest in peace, and may we meet again soon in a better place.

I’m sure I could write something fairly respectable if I started tinkering at the keyboard until I managed to cobble a workable piece. It’s just that I don’t think it would be very honest. There are moments where you feel as if you really do have something useful to say, and then there are these…other moments. My heart isn’t in it. Various developments have temporarily (I hope 🙏) derailed me. I’m a bit bruised, numb, and anxious. I find a need to slow down, recharge, and regroup. I hope it doesn’t take too long 😉.

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Two quick preliminary points. I’ve recently completed two streaming series (both on HBO Max as it happens):

The first was DTF St. Louis. I’m sure it’s a good series and I know it’s one that many respected critics have enjoyed. It had its moments for me, and I thought both the performances and the story were subtle and quietly impressive. In the end, I wasn’t entirely sold on it. It had a plodding feel to me that is just not (at this particular juncture) what I need to be doing. In all fairness, I want to give it another try when (if?) things settle-down and I can focus more patiently and cleanly.

The second was The Pitt. Plodding, it isn’t. It takes place in a Pittsburg hospital ER (get it?) and it washes over you like a firehose. It’s constant motion by multiple people at once. Multiple stories are interwoven. It’s graphic and intense, but in the midst of the overall chaos it has its share of quieter and more ordinary human stories as well. There are many outstanding performances in a very large cast. As far as I can say as a layman, the medical stuff is realistic and very well-done. It’s addictive for streaming. I loved it!

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This brings me to my point. For a while now, I’ve been interested in amateur photography. Some years back, I purchased a Canon Rebel T100 at Walmart. I make no claims to great skill or technical knowledge, but I think of it as a fun hobby. On occasion, it comes in handy as a tool for modest social commentary. At my age, it’s easier and more productive to take photos than to do other more strenuous activities.

Here are a few selected photos:

^The falling of the Ginkgo leaves is an annual event in Lexington. Draws crowds every year in November. This is close to the Henry Clay Estate.

^The upstairs seating area here has been a hangout for me almost every Thursday afternoon since we came to Lexington. I do some of my writing there.

^This is one of those moments where a photo can make an activist statement (worth a thousand words, as the saying goes).

^This was no ordinary sunset. Extreme western forest fires in July of 2021 created these hazy sky conditions as far east as Kentucky.

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I have probably hundreds of these. Some are OK and some are less so. I’ll comb thru my files eventually and post any more interesting ones that I can find.

Until later. 🙂

“The whirlwind is coming.” *

*EJS Downs 1 3-28-26

That was my response to someone on Facebook the other day with respect to the NO KINGS international demonstrations of last Saturday. I said this in the heat of the moment with utter conviction.

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“America as we have known it is over.” *

*EJS Downs 1 3-31-26

Yesterday, I said the above (paraphrasing) to a separate person on Facebook. I made both statements with equal fervor and almost-equal certainty. I felt no sense of contradiction nor any requirement to edit myself for consistency. I spoke as if I knew both things to be equally true. I’m not entirely sure if I even recalled immediately after the second comment that I was the same person who had also made the first one 🥴.

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But… here we are. I’m caught in a paradox. That’s a slippery word. Even standard dictionaries define it differently in subtle ways. I’ve decided on this one:

…a figure of speech that seems to contradict itself, but which, upon further examination, contains some kernel of truth or reason.

The second part of that description is often overlooked, but it’s what matters to us in this moment. A true paradox cannot be complete nonsense. It must contain an unexpected linkage to a deeper truth. What might be that “…deeper truth” here 🤔?

If you ask me, it’s this: We are in an era of unmitigated destruction. Much that is familiar and customary is in a stage of being blasted away. To paraphrase Hemingway in a new context, “We failed slowly at first, and then suddenly”. As surely as a dawning geological age, America is on the doorstep of another beginning. It might be a new way forward. We need to work (both ruthlessly and creatively) to get it right. Whether we can steer ourselves to better days or will simply be forever stranded on the desolate beaches of forgotten history is the question hanging in the balance.

Trump and his MAGA acolytes misunderstand much about America, but I think they somehow stumbled to one insight: We aren’t going backwards to anything. We aren’t restoring the genteel bipartisan consensus which has held in our country for so long (and for which so many of us older folks pine today in spite of ourselves). That’s a thing of the past, as obsolete in its own way as coal-oil lamps.

I’m reasonably sure that Trump and his parade of horriblities will fall. They’re too wicked, perverted, and deranged to continue indefinitely. They are too thoroughly Un-American (in the classical sense) to persist in a nation that (whatever its faults both historically and currently) retains yet a powerful measure of goodwill toward America’s eternal higher principles.

As is healthy and normal among peaceful and law-abiding people, we can be slow to erupt. We want mostly to be left alone to our quiet pursuits. But erupt we will 😠, and history has shown us to be an implacable foe in those occasional angry and righteous moments when we’re left with no alternative.

The banishment of the outlaw Trump and the defeat of MAGA are vitally important to our survival as a society, but they are only part of the problem (perhaps not even the largest part?). We have a civilization to reconstruct, with a more humane and durable design this time around. Much that is being broken as we speak cannot be replaced. Some of what is broken should not be replaced! We are in a moment in our history where it’s possible to consider realistic possibilities to correct defects (another paradox in this situation). That’s the good news 🙂.

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The bad news is that we have difficult and dangerous work to do before we can get there. The sooner we get started, the sooner we can finish. 🌞

“My way of life Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf.” *

*(Macbeth speaking in “Macbeth, Act 5, scene 3” as he realizes his remaining time is short.)

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I’ve had moments in the not-so-distant past where I might flatter myself as something of a man of action (seriously😉). For at least the last ten years, I’ve regarded myself (metaphorically - if only barely so at times) as a warrior in service of the defeat of the ever-more-loathsome Trump/MAGA movement. I’ve thought of myself as one who might be persuaded to do my small part in organized physical resistance if it were to be vetted and arranged by cooler heads. I have not thought of myself as disposed to suicidal gestures of no positive effect, so I’ve had no reason to this point to venture past talk and gestures.

I’ve haven’t gone out of my way to make any special secret of this. I’ve written (carefully and with restraint) about it more than once. MAGA-types have never struck me on the whole as personalities who could be moved by either reason and knowledge, ordinary human decency, or by naive appeals to the “greater good”. A resentful and vindictive meanness rests in their spirits and at their hearts (I’ve known people like this my entire life). It only required someone of Trump’s uniquely malevolent gifts to awaken it to broad public consumption. I’ve even been slightly contemptuous of those on our side who try so hard to feel differently in the face of what I see as immutable evidence to the contrary.

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This is the unconscious attitude I carried with me when I decided to attend my church in Mount Sterling last Sunday (pictured above). I’m an unpeaceful sleeper at the best of times. An overnight time-change left me tossing and restless. I awoke early. I took advantage to make the drive over for 10:30 am services. I did a few household projects beforehand, so I was in deficit already.

When I arrived, I parked in the back parking lot. I usually park along the street in front (a much shorter entry, pictured above), but I wanted to take a look at our designated family Columbarium spaces on the way in. That’s more easily done from the back lot (these little diversions seem individually harmless, but they will accumulate to a sobering revelation).

Unlike the short and direct entry from the front directly into the main sanctuary, the back entry is somewhat circuitous. One enters at split ground level, traverses the entire length of the large building and arrives at a series of short flights of stairs and landings up at the front. You climb upward into the front nave area and the main sanctuary. I’m sure I’ve done this dozens of times over the years (probably ran up there as a very young man). I know I’ve done this with minimal effort in the last five years.

So I stride confidently into the rear reception area and across thru the first floor Fellowship Hall (Again, nothing new here. I’ve done this many times). I approach the first of four total short flights of stairs and begin my ascent. After maybe five or six steps, something feels ever so slightly…different. I’m stifling pangs of unease🙁. For the first time ever in my memory, I decide that perhaps I should use the handrail. With my new strategy in hand, I defeat the first flight. I rest there on the landing for a moment (again, a first).

As I start up the second flight, it dawns on me that the handrail technique has a weakness: It requires me to walk straight up the stairs and absorb each step’s full height with my full weight. With more than two flights to go, it isn’t going to happen. I wearily achieve the second landing and pause for actually a bit longer than I did on the first landing. My legs trembled. I was sweating. It literally crossed my mind at this point to retreat back down and search-out another route. A rough mental calculation of time and space informed me that no alternative would work. I had to either get there from where I was or be vanquished mid-stairs in the attempt until someone located me there, alive or otherwise🥴.

Necessity is (as ever) the mother of invention. I adjusted my strategy a third and final time: I decided that if I could serpentine my path (something they teach in the military to avoid gunfire) from one side to the other up the stairs while simultaneously shifting from a left to right handrail grip as I went, I had a fair chance of making it to the top. And there it so laboriously (comically? 😉) went.

At the moment just as I reached the summit, I was struck by the absurdity of someone in the nave recognizing me as I stumbled up into view like someone coming from out of the desert. I don’t get there often anymore physically, and I nearly laughed out loud at what they might imagine had happened to me since my last visit (I find things like that both appalling and funny 😁). If I was in fact observed, no one said anything. I can’t say that I blame them 😉.

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So what happened to the “warrior” 🤔? I’m guessing somewhere around the second landing, it was becoming clear to me that it was no longer a part of my destiny to spend actual time on the ramparts. If it were to come to that, someone else would be called-upon to defeat the evildoers. My role will of necessity be one of articulating the case and contributing to the team what I can around the margins. I will certainly try to do that to the best of my ability, but we need more…much, much more.

In fact, I personally believe that to this point, one of the defects of the fight against Trump/MAGA is that too many of us who take this evil threat most seriously are too old to make a serious fight of it if it’s required. Many of us remember the ‘60’s’, but we can no longer put those lessons to practical use. What we might imagine in our memories is not available for the job at hand today.

We need the physical strength, intelligence, and energy of younger people. I don’t think we can entirely succeed without them. It’s a big part of my generation’s job to help them to understand that. They are the ones who will exist for much of their lifetimes with whatever governing system emerges from our present turmoil. They have far more to lose than we do if it goes wrong. 🙁

I’ve always been a worker. I can never remember a time when I didn’t enjoy and thrive upon actual physical labor. I know that’s at odds with my more studious pursuits, but there you have it. It’s a conflict I’ve worked my whole life to resolve. I was raised in a blue-collar working family. I find a purity and a clarity in hard physical work that I can’t find anywhere else. To this day, I still think of even my small literary efforts in terms of a product: Something must come to physically exist, and something must happen because it was there.

I did student-teaching after college, moved to various mid-levels of white-collar industrial management in my hometown, then to house-painter/handyman, and finally to fifteen years as a spray-painter at Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Georgetown, Kentucky (granted, a circuitous and atypical path). I enjoyed it all for the most part, but I probably liked the last stop the best. It was hard and very repetitive work, but it was a big and exciting world-class environment where interesting things were always happening and interesting people were always around.

The hardest single day of work I remember ever doing was installing concrete right-of-way markers on a road-construction project during a summer job in my college years. I won’t belabor the details, but these things weigh 100 pounds or more and must be buried 2-3 feet deep using a gasoline-powered hand auger. They are invariably required in the most inconvenient places in the most difficult terrain available. I finished the hot summer day utterly exhausted after placing maybe 40 (?) of them in every kind of varied location. In addition to the things I’ve listed, I’ve had 10 or more short-term/part-time positions at varied intervals over my life.

I mention all this to demonstrate that I’m flexible about what I choose to do. I’m not “…too good…” to do any kind of honest work, and I actually have done a lot of it in my time…* *EJS Downs 1

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…but there is one job I could never do: I could not be a talk-show host on one of these typical cable daily/evening political shows. That has to be the most soul-draining experience I can imagine: Sitting there day after day droning on-and-on, pretending every day that this is the most important thing in the history of the world…only to have that subject vanish in a week (or a day, or an hour these days) and then to force yourself to move on to the new “…most important thing in the history of the world…” and to have to do that over and over again, like Sisyphus in the fable.

To be fair, most of these performing artists (deliberate words) are attractive and (usually) articulate people. They tend to be quick-witted (the mics in the ears help 😉) and well-educated. You can occasionally glean a genuine sharp insight (almost by accident in the overall carnage of carnival puffery and chest-thumping buffoonery inherent in this cynical format). Some are certainly more consistently better than others. Some are more consistently honest than others. A relative few are uniformly excellent.

But they all suffer from the same inherent defect: A gallon of water cannot fill a five-gallon bucket. There are simply not enough genuinely significant developments every day to fill what…20 or 30 (?) of these verbose hour-long shows across all media platforms. Airtime fills itself with redundant and repetitive hyped themes, usually punctuated by juvenile name-calling and infotainment wrestling matches masquerading as ‘debate’. It doesn’t feel honest. It doesn’t feel lived.

I’m not saying these people need to have actually installed right-of-way markers on a hot summer day at some point in their past (It would be great for their character if they had: You can’t talk them in there!). But I would certainly feel better if they seemed like the kinds of people who could have done that if asked, and who would not have regarded it as beneath their station to do so. I’m sure the men in my photo would have done it, and that alone builds a certain kind of unique trust.

Bein’ honest, I don’t see much of that out there these days 😟🤔.

This may appear to be an odd place to start my next post, but it plays perfectly into my thesis: There can never be so much sadness and strife (OK, evil) in our consciousness that there is no room for happiness and innocent satisfaction. We mustn’t surrender to the temptation to cloister ourselves in unrelieved misery. God (however you interpret that ethos) has created a beautiful and wonderous world for us. The entirety of humankind is only a fraction of that creation (some might say the lesser fraction). The rest of it would continue on its way unabated if all of us disappeared today. Nature is indifferent and owes us nothing (Somehow, I find that comforting 😉).

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Tom Waits (“Come Up to the House”):

🎼The world is not my home, I’m just a-passsin’ thru…👨‍🎤

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The video above illustrates something of that (And by-the-way, it apparently is real and not AI. There is human interaction and perhaps some pre-conditioning, but this is not out-of-character to otters’ natural behavior). It’s gently humorous and it evokes in me a positive happy reaction. It tells me how alike we can be at our best.

Over-and-over on social media, I see examples of those of the so-called ‘primitive’ world acting in ways that are mindful to me of how those of us of the so-called ‘civilized ‘😉 world should behave (but too often don’t in these bankrupt modern times). Here’s another one:

There’s a shared spirituality in these events. How can normal people look upon these and fail to realize that we’ve lost something vital? We’ve placed ourselves apart from the vast and thriving natural organism to which we are supposed to be contributing. Compare this to the cynical and morbid trash of your everyday TV and online content. Who has the better claim to moral superiority? Who appears most blameless in the eyes of God?

I could go on all day (Social media is replete with these motifs as most of us know, and many are at best suspicious. I’ve tried to avoid that here), but I’ll settle for just one more:

This site does employ AI, but I don’t think that’s the case here. Taken as a whole, this video gives every appearance of being natural. There is none of the sometimes-bizarre sensationalism we associate with AI creations. It seems almost too ordinary to be more than just a tender expression of genuine compassion across species (There aren’t a lot of ‘clicks’ in that).

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So is there a point to this? There is, but it’s a bit elusive even to me 🤔.

I want to be clear that I don’t intend this piece as only sentimental pap. Nature has many sides (“…red in tooth and claw…” to Tennyson). Some are savage beyond remorse and are accepted within the code of life.

But there is also this duality: Love and fun and better angels; ‘humanity’ more in evidence here than in our distorted selves. This era of cartoonish evil ascendant and even exalted in some quarters makes that harder to remember, but it will pass. We’ll come again to the better instincts that live eternally, not only in us but in all of God’s creations.

Until then.

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First, the world has passed me by. 🤔

It’s taken me a while to grasp that. As human beings, we’re prone to denial. The inability to ’matter’ (the passive invisibility of irrelevance) is nearly as traumatic as death itself. And like death, it’s inevitable at some point. I’m OK with it; In some ways, it relieves me of the pressure to perform responsibly in this terrible day and time, other than as I find myself occasionally seized with a contrary notion in a momentary frenzy of unreality.

Somewhere along my lengthy path, it occurred to me that the scenery was no longer familiar. We’re in a time and in a place that I no longer recognize. The rules have changed. The shared unspoken assumptions are different. Brains work differently. I find myself in the personally embarrassing position of having to say things out loud that no one should have to say in the twenty-first century in America. I feel a compulsion to try to explain things that in a previous and more lucid time were part of common understanding and would have required no explanation at all.

I’m no longer in any position (if I ever was) to make any useful observations or give any useful advice. I don’t understand any of this, and I no longer wish to try to understand it. To “understand” would cost me my sanity and my soul. We’re in a place of national and (quite possibly) irredeemable madness.

I’ll give two quick and fairly minor examples and then I’ll move on:

(1) I hear all the time on cable-tv and online that “Democrats” oppose this or that MAGA policy or Trump initiative. Is rigid partisan alignment with one or another political party all that is required to be in opposition to certain things? Are there not cases where it’s a matter of plain common sense, or just ordinary humanity? I don’t know anymore, but I can say for sure that there was a time when that was the case. I lived in it for decades. Not everything was better then, but that part was.

(2) Another small annoyance that demonstrates to me a larger issue is encapsulated in the phrase “Critics oppose…” or “Critics warn…” etc. What else would critics do? Just tell me what they said and let me decide what they are. I get irritated by this modern tendency to dumb-down language and guide us to some preordained and simplistic binary conclusion.

That was the easy part for me. It’s going to get harder as we move forward. 🙂________________________

Secondly, there are things that can’t be fixed (Or even if maybe they could be, it’s really hard and very uncertain😕).

As some of you may have surmised if you’ve been alert, I’ve tended for years now to become impatient and irritated at the perpetual tendency to theorize and complain back-and-forth (among primarily our like-minded tribes) about Trump and the MAGA revolution such as it is. We’ll do it again today for sure: We’ll chatter like magpies and give each other headaches and indigestion. Then like Sisyphus and the boulder, we’ll wait for the inevitable next provocation and do it all again.

I’m no different than anyone else. We all share this instinct to huddle and to commiserate. I’ve certainly felt it myself. In fact, I’ve had personal experience with it directly in my own life over…decades (?). Without going into overt detail, I’ll stipulate that I grew-up in an immediate family of five in a periodically dysfunctional home. Episodic, bender-style alcoholism was a way of life that punctuated an otherwise-normal household in ways that would not be believed (I can barely believe them myself and I was there for much of it). The difficult earlier traumas eventually gave way to a certain resigned and detached numbness, and an emptiness of spirit (There are many useful studies about alcoholic families these days that describe all this. Not so much then).

Through it all, we talked (and talked; and then talked some more). We talked to each other. We talked to ministers and doctors and counselors and policemen and friends and extended family members. At some point, the immediate crisis would subside. We would rest for a while and go on about our lives as if nothing was amiss. As sure as night follows day, it would flare again and we would return to our usual manic talking routine (The truth is that we developed over time a morbid fascination with the whole business. It became a sort of obsessive entertainment: What might happen this time? How low could it go? How bizarre could it get? Does any of that feel familiar?).

This went on with interruptions and stops-and-starts for every bit of thirty-five years. We were able to do essentially absolutely nothing of constructive value to break this relentless cycle. The circle of life turned on its axis. The illness eventually resolved into old age and death. Our torrents of words and theories over the years had precisely the same effect as if we had done nothing at all (which is in fact, pretty much what we did do in the end). We made a choice by refusing to make one in a situation where (understandably) none of the options seemed clear and there were no obvious convenient answers.

I think this current national tragic impasse has awakened in me the memories of my own private struggles from years ago, and that is what makes me feel such familiar and acute PTSD/anxiety over it. I don’t know what to do 🥴. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Every path forward presents its unique risks and dangers. Every path is uncertain. The failure to choose any path also comes at a cost (thirty-five years in my personal case) and is of course a choice of its own.

If there’s any chance to rescue ourselves (short of more-or-less conventionally waiting it out and hoping for the best) it’s going to require strong, intelligent, disciplined, and courageous leadership. It will have to be able to properly assess risks and then take calculated actions around those it deems acceptable. It’s likely to involve personal danger (in fact, it already has) and one must understand and accept that up front. There can be no advance guarantees that anything can work successfully.

(Or if things drift far south, you can hold-out for thirty-five years and let nature take its course. I won’t be around for that. 🙂).

Before I start this piece, I want my regular readers and those whose work I regularly follow and read myself to take this as the modest and somewhat tongue-in-cheek critique intended. It is by no means a reflection on the many wonderful writers and their great work that I regularly encounter and follow in here and online generally 🙂.

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I’ve always been a reader, and I aspired even as a youngster to be something of a writer as well. Language resonated. The stories that are carried on written and spoken words resonate with me to this day. I vaguely recall a short story I wrote as an elementary student called “The Blue Figure” (seriously). I barely recall what it was about, but it had something to do with a benign spectral demon who inhabited a certain room. There were others, long forgotten.

I still recall reading with rapt attention a picture storybook about a small carved wooden canoe replica with a single Indian passenger. It was placed somewhere into the Great Lakes, and we transfixed readers followed its harrowing journey from there all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

We had a set of 50’s-era Compton’s Encyclopedias that I eventually read nearly all the way thru. At one time, I read many stories in the KJV Bible and was familiar with many of the prominent people there (less so today, time has dulled much of this). I was an English major in college and later a student-teacher. I can hardly think of a significant element of my personality that was not formed in some way by my lifelong habits of reading, watching, and listening.

I occasionally wonder today if all that effort is still worthwhile. We’re in a different world today (as self-styled MAGA historians never tire of telling us) and the rules are different. It’s the age of hormonal, high-octane, mush-mouthed buffoonery. Words don’t work like they once did (for one thing, we’re too functionally illiterate overall as a society to either fully understand or properly use most of them).

They’ve become less tools of informed communication and more ersatz weapons of war in service of our juvenile and interminable ‘debates’: They cut and burn; they conceal and disguise and label; they shout; they divide. What they far too often do not do, is teach.

And there are so very many of them now! This format and so many, many others churn words twenty-four hours a day, every day (I’m not blameless on this point. I do my share). If we were to run out of water today, my little wooden boat could make the Gulf of Mexico on rivers of words alone.

And yet why is it that the more there are, the less meaning they have? We can still fire them by the billions at machine-gun speed. We just can no longer aim them. Some of you may recall the history of German hyper-inflation of post-WW1: It took a wheelbarrow full of currency to buy a loaf of bread. I think we see something of that phenomenon today in our inflated currency of words: It takes an awful lot of them just to get a loaf of bread. It hardly seems worth the effort sometimes.

One can still find worthwhile gems (as ever) but the amount of refuse you must sort to get there has become nearly prohibitive: jargon, boilerplate, cliche’, cant (not ‘can’t’), newspeak, repetition, imitation, fallacy, nonsense, self-aggrandizement, verbosity, just plain bull…I could go on all day if I had time, but the point is made (And enough already! I certainly don’t wish to be the proof of my own complaint 😉).

We have no mature choice but to continue the quest, but we shouldn’t waste our time on mediocrity. Where we find competent and sincere sources who do consistently honest and entertaining work, we should stay with them and support their efforts. It won’t happen every day, but it’s still worth it in the long run. Words may not seem to matter very much now, but their time is sure to come again.

Me again. I realize it’s been a while.

Due to various personal factors, I find myself simultaneously in the curious position of having little to say and an irrational need to say it anyway. Even now peering at this screen, I’m not sure I can conceive an integrated story. Would anyone object if I veered away from my usual script and ad-libbed a few loosely connected observations (I hope not, because here they come anyway 😉)?

I want to apologize in advance: This is not a polished piece. I hope in any case that an alert reader out there might find a few ideas worthy of consideration. If even one manages to do so, it justifies my effort such as it is.

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In no special order:

(1) We’re starting into our second year of living dangerously (and yes, I shamelessly borrowed that expression from a 1982 movie title and an earlier novel. I think it fits better here than it did then). There will be other such years to follow. I offer nothing in terms of hopes or solutions, but you don’t have to be Heather Cox Richardson to see that we’re passengers on the Titanic in the North Atlantic. Worse yet, our demented captain wants to hit icebergs 🥴!

(2) The discrepancy between the torrential gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in our commentariat class (here in Substack and elsewhere), and the stolid complacency of the broader public is striking. Nobody dares mention it out-loud out there 🤫. It’s nearly all anyone talks about in here 🤯.

I don’t often attend my hometown church of (literally) seventy years anymore, but we watch it online almost every Sunday morning. It’s a source of renewal to us in good times and bad, and a valued connection to our hometown community. But in most substantive respects, I could hardly tell today’s services from those of 1955 (We invaded Venezuela yesterday, didn’t we !?). Do I find that comforting? Baffling? Both? We stand side-by-side, and gaze upon completely different worlds.

(3) It’s objectively true that little has changed in our personal lives since 2024: The cost-of-living is higher, but not (so far) unbearably so. We’re retired and our floodwalls appear to be holding at this point. The stock market is (so far) doing well. We have health issues, but we don’t blame anyone else for that. Life appears to flow along at more-or-less its usual pace. At our ages, we’ll probably make it out of here without seeing any enormous personal differences…

…but the persistent unease that appears to be lingering mostly silently everywhere around us is not only a narrow question of direct anecdotal experience. It comes to us thru our TV sets and online experiences, and it subtly permeates all of our public interactions. It’s impossible to sustain any confidence in the future, and it’s exhausting to continually await the inevitable next car-wreck.

(4) We have a false cartoon archetype of strength in America (see Hegseth) but what happened to character 🤔? Both are important, but we’ll see later that character matters more. If we get another chance to learn that lesson, it will most likely be the hard way and too late to matter. It may be already too late. I hope not.

(5) We’ve been fortunate throughout our history in somehow finding the person to meet the moment at times of crisis. I’ve recently revisited the Ken Burns PBS series on “The American Revolution” and “The Civil War”.

Without the exact personage of George Washington in the right place at the right time, we would not have won the Revolution. The totality of his character not only carried the day in war against great odds and thru powerful reversals but gave us a chance to move forward to a new democratic society in peace when that was in no sense a preordained result.

You can make the same claim for Abraham Lincoln. His forceful defense (literally to death itself) of a unified America at all costs (at a time when less drastic solutions were possible and even seen as practical by many ‘reasonable’ authorities) gave us an America that would eventually stretch from coast-to-coast as one nation. It was his unique character above all that allowed him to swim against the prevailing tides, withstand many failures, and save the union.

Winston Churchill was only half 😉 American but who can doubt that he played that indispensable part in WW2 and saved humanity as we’ve known it in the process.

Crisis both reveals character and molds character. Who is that leader today? We know who it isn’t, don’t we?

(6) I’ll close with one observation (rather, a rare prediction): There’s no “happy ending” to this current America story in the sense that we return to the way we were (another movie reference) before these ten years happened. Too much pottery has been broken for that. If we manage to break this current trajectory at some future point, we’ll be forced to start anew. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it will be up to those who can embrace that reality to see it thru. Who do we have out here with the courage and the skill (the character?) to do that?

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Let President Lincoln close it out (who more appropriate to the moment?):

“As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” *

*1862 address to Congress.

From my early school days in Mount Sterling KY, I was never much for clubs or really any kind of formal group associations. I was born into a baby-boomer peer neighborhood clique that I really did enjoy (I remain a loose part of what remains of it to this day) and where we certainly had a lot of fun while committing our fair share of boyish (and otherwise) mischief. I went to a small, close-knit ‘city’ high school with the same crowd. I attended the same church where we maintain active membership after moving to Lexington seven years ago.

Debbie and I have led a quiet life for the most part. We were childless (somewhat by loose choice) and this gradually narrowed many avenues in a small, family-oriented community. We had our hobbies and our pastimes; mostly things we could do more-or-less by ourselves or as a couple. I worked out-of-town in Georgetown for fifteen years. We went out for events (with or without others) on occasion, but we were never aggressive about promoting ourselves or pushing ourselves onto other groups. Our extended family associations carried certain uneasy baggage and unresolved grudges. I think in hindsight, we were a little inhibited by that in a place where there are few secrets and long memories.

As with many people, the holiday season has not been an especially happy one for me in many years: Too many people gone, too many haunting old memories, too many half-recalled impressions of seasonal strife and anxious turmoil. But the wonder of life is that exceptions can occasionally present themselves and happiness can for a time bloom anew.

The one time in my recent history that I got close to something different for a moment was in 2017. I actually felt for a brief instant the same warm and secure comfortable glow that I could only dimly recall from my childhood holiday celebrations in Mount Sterling (That’s another way of saying that was before reality had begun to impose its implacable will, and things began to erode).

This is the one I want to talk about.

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It came about in an unlikely way and an unlikely place:

When Trump was elected in 2016, I was as flabbergasted as the rest of those of common decency and good sense everywhere. I was sort of floundering for some way of becoming active in the anti-Trump movement (it was immediately obvious to me that he would be a disaster as president… in 2016!). I found myself eventually in Lexington (No such broad activity was available in Mount Sterling, and it still isn’t so far as I know🥴). Someone had referred me to a chapter meeting of the Central Kentucky Chapter of KFTC*. They meet once a month. I found my way over there by impulse in mid-2017 after a trip to Keeneland Racetrack one day in the spring.

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*(For a bit of background, KFTC is a progressive grassroots social-services organization that has been active in Kentucky for over forty years. It’s one of the national pioneers in those many community-based activities it supports and sustains. It has numerous local chapters around Kentucky. Check the link. Give them a call if there’s anything there that might be of interest).

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I was quietly impressed at my first meeting, and frankly somewhat surprised that Trump’s name barely came up (!) I had expected loud and overt antagonism about MAGA. As it happened, most of the low-key discussion was about what I would regard as ‘smaller’ local issues: rent, voter registration, city council, local racial issues, etc. I was told that in fact, many new people had come in after the 2016 election expecting an exclusively anti-Trump platform. Some had departed when these hopes weren’t immediately realized.

It took me a while to get used to that, but I found that I liked the people there, I enjoyed the sense of community (me😳? ), I felt seen and appreciated, and I began to see the value in (as an old expression goes) “…set(ting) your bucket down where you’re at…”. I never once had that familiar awkward feeling 😟 of trying to force yourself in where you aren’t entirely sure you belong.

Still in Mount Sterling at the time, I continued to attend monthly meetings and began to involve myself in some of KFTC’s grassroots campaigns. Before long, I was doing door-to-door and telephone canvassing actions. I attended informal social gatherings now-and-again. I became deeply involved in voter registration efforts, among other KFTC local activities. I have to say that in those days, I had a lot of physical energy when I was really committed to a course of action. I used every bit of it.

That year culminated in the KFTC Central KY Chapter Christmas Party (picture above). I really enjoyed this event. I had the feeling I was finally settling into a new and permanent place after a long time in a kind of scattered and isolated wilderness. For a moment (to be completely fair, for some longer period of time thereafter), I had the feeling of a second chance. I had captured lightning in a bottle.

I spent the next seven years in regular participation with KFTC. People came and people went (If I might interject a personal observation, today’s younger people are generally less tethered to anything or to anyone than my generation tended to be. Maybe that’s a good thing, and it may even be necessary in today’s world. I must say that it sometimes feels hollow to me. Among other things, these constant transitions made it harder for me to maintain my idealized notions. It gradually became difficult to completely avoid the idea that at the staff level, KFTC was just another career-opportunity to be abandoned when something better came along 🤔).

I had my ups-and-downs with the organization. I can be prideful 😠. Nevertheless, I did my work (what I call “…choppin’ wood… 🪓” ) thru good times and bad. I served the best I could for as long as I could. I’ve now more-or-less passed the burden off to new blood and a younger generation. I still do occasional small projects for KFTC or other local progressive political organizations (Progress Kentucky comes to mind, among others).

The memories remain.

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I’m eternally grateful for the opportunities KFTC provided to me. It gave me a chance to transfer my narrow anti-Trump anger into broader constructive action. I met people in situations and in places that I would never have otherwise encountered. KFTC expanded my horizons. I learned to be more tolerant of others (even to some degree in serious political disputes). I learned not to judge by outward appearances. I learned to be a better listener. I learned to keep trying. I learned patience.

I’m not sure at our place in life in 2019 that we would have ever relocated without their influence. My hometown was a wonderful place to grow up, and it retains many wonderful qualities. It’s not an easy thing to make dramatic changes so late in life. If we had not done that, we would not have had the chance (as aging small-town retired people with minimal deep social and familial connections) to experience a more stimulating autumn (winter?) of our lives.

We find ourselves thankful for all of it, then and now. It’s brought us home. 🙂

I just finished this wonderful movie on Amazon Prime. If I were you, I would watch it. It’s profound, troubling, and deeply appropriate to our current madness. There are those among us who are going to face similar tribulations when America eventually rediscovers itself. Will it be too late for you? Well…that’s the question, isn’t it 🤔?

The idea here is that very near to the end of WW2 and as the German armed forces are everywhere collapsing, two war-torn and tormented people meet by happenstance in the remote and scenically beautiful Tyrolean Alps in Austria. It’s true that they find themselves in this idyllic and essentially isolated location (hard trouble seems impossible here, but of course it isn’t), but it’s equally true that each of them carries with them nightmares of a horrific past that was lived in very different kinds of places. She is a cultivated upper-class refugee from Munich, and he is a cultivated upper-class young man from the same city. They nostalgically discuss familiar nightclubs and places-of-interest there with knowing and comfortable familiarity.

But they are a long way from pre-war Munich, and much around them and certainly within them has changed since then. Both are in hiding and on-the-run. She is Jewish and has paid local villagers for an out-of-the-way place to hide from Nazi persecution (she is the only surviving member of her immediate family). He is also in hiding and on-the-run, but from the opposite direction in every conceivable way. He is a member of the Nazi SS who has participated (albeit, reluctantly) in genocidal crimes against civilians. He’s running from American forces coming up thru Italy who are committed to executing SS members on sight.

They start-out as simply two people in not-real-specific trouble who try to help each other out (This initial incomplete knowledge of each other is an important understanding to the story as it develops). Neither is immediately aware of the other’s full background, but mutual knowledge fills the gaps gradually over time. It’s fair to say that there are many ups-and-downs. I won’t say more about the movie because I don’t want to spoil it for those who will watch it.

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But I was deeply struck by the obvious (not easy, but obvious) philosophical and even theological questions that were raised (and only partly answered, as it happened, being not entirely resolvable): How absolute is the religious injunction to forgive? What is the weight of genuine remorse and clear acts of atonement in deserving forgiveness? Is there any limit to the power of redemption?

In my personal Christian faith, these questions are not especially difficult theologically. Christ advises us to forgive “…seven times seventy.” (It says so right there in the bible). We are told that judgment is for God only, and not for humanity. We are told that mercy is not only to the benefit of the transgressor, but to ourselves as well.

I’m uncertain if I possess the qualities of faith required to be good in this spiritual realm. I can mouth the words as I read them on a sheet of paper, but I have not been sufficiently tested to this point in my life to know for sure if I could truly live them. I hope I could, but I’m a fallible human being. I can’t know for sure in advance.

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The characters in “The Deserter” know. They have been tested in a way that few of us will ever face. It’s both painful and deeply thought-provoking to watch it work itself out.

(A Happy Thanksgiving and a great Holiday season to everyone. 🙂)

One month ago to the day, I was blindsided by an unexpected and quite serious family medical emergency. As it involves someone other than myself, I won’t be saying more about it in here for now. The situation appears to be resolving itself as we speak 🙏.

My point is that from the perspective of what I do in here, I was suddenly derailed from not only my writing projects on Substack, but all of my social-media contacts and my usual informal outside pastimes and visitations as well. I was forced into a frantic new world of immediate personal crisis. I found myself wearily slogging (sometimes literally) up steps and down elevators day-by-day as best I could. I spent entire days in a state of hovering anxious gloom. That is not a conducive environment for either careful contemplation or for artful writing.

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I’m now at a moment where I’m trying to locate my familiar rhythms and return to what I do best, but I’m finding it hard to do. Trump, the Epstein files…well, all of the accumulated detritus of our current febrile list of national current-events comedies…seems…silly. Everyday life-and-death matters awaiting each of us all the time have a way of concentrating the mind upon the essentials.

Don’t take me the wrong way: I comprehend the dangers our society faces today as well as I ever did. It’s just that I’m not sure what I (me…personally!) can further do about them. This will be the 58th Substack piece I’ve written. No less than 33 of these have related directly to what we can loosely call the “…Trump/MAGA problem”. Many of these have implied fairly stern measures of resistance. I stand behind every one of them today (They are all on record in my Substack profile. I would encourage you to read them if you haven’t already done so 👀).

But I can see no profit (to me or to anyone else) to continue simply regurgitating the same arguments and insults over-and-over. The issue here is as plain as can be, and there is no merit to relitigating it every day. Barring overwhelming new developments (I don’t rule that out) I’ve made such points on that as I know how to make. Life is (literally!) too short and there are other important things to think about and to do. I was reminded of this only yesterday at the funeral service for a lifetime friend. Some of these important things are in areas where I might have a chance to make a small but substantive difference. Some of these are in areas that are simply fun and/or interesting and require no further justification.

I plan to continue my structured support of the anti-Trump movement as best I can at intervals, as called-upon to do so. I will otherwise be in a search to chart a new course and updated priorities for what time I have left.

Stay tuned. 🙂

I’ve been opposed to all things Trump/ MAGA since 2015 (and in spirit since 1948 😉). I’ve always seen them as more than just the usual GOP opposition to even a moderate Democratic Party program. Trump has wakened something dormant in them that is far more sinister than that. Before it became the widely held belief it now is, I saw in TRUMP/MAGA an extremist, angry, anti-democracy cabal with a penchant for extra-legal authoritarian domination. I felt that given the chance, they would gleefully practice aggressive public repression against legitimate peaceful opponents.

I can still recall a public counter-demonstration of perhaps 1000 people in downtown Lexington, KY in the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville white-supremacist rallies. I remember (literally!) scanning the windows and roof tops across the street from the Courthouse Square for the potential presence of gunmen from one or another of the various raging militia groups that supported Trump then (2017!) and now. I suppose I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while 😉. Nothing came of that (slightly) premature suspicion, but nothing that has happened since has done anything to ameliorate my concerns. I’ve more worried now than I’ve ever been, and I see no bottom in sight. 🙁

For those who may not be following the everyday flow of our shared turmoil (I can’t imagine who you might be, but I can’t entirely blame you 😉), there is an anti-Trump demonstration scheduled nationwide for Saturday, October 18th. There are over 2000 sites currently listed, covering all 50 states. At this point, there’s no formal international participation scheduled, but it’s widely assumed there will be an international response as there was at the June 14th event. These are grave issues of worldwide impact and importance. We can expect others to have their say (perhaps even more vociferously than we can in these tragic days of meek American inversion🤐🧏👨‍🦯).

We’re self-evidently on the hinge of a decisive moment in the brief but exalted story of our United States of America. We have only hard choices left, and few of those. I’ve been to many ceremonies and demonstrations over the years for all manner of public causes. Some I barely even supported, but I’m a soldier and I went.

This one feels different! 🤔

For the first time in my memory, I’m genuinely afraid to be out there 😰. I have a glimmering premonition of impending disaster. We’re going square into harm’s way against not only the imagined and scattered private threats of 2017 and beyond, but the infinitely-more-powerful institutional threats of a hijacked federal apparatus that knows no boundaries to its authority. We’ve been overtaken by a collective mass hysteria that is in fact a form of public madness 🥴 (We’ve seen this before. Just not here). It’s hard to imagine it ends well. 10-18 is potentially an armed incendiary device 💣. It requires only someone (wonder who 🤔?) to ignite it.

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So of course we must go forward as best we can 🙂. We have a duty to ourselves, our country, and our posterity. If anyone read my recent story “The Cross of My Calling” about the 9-11 firefighters, you know the question we have to answer: “Who’s going up the stairs this time?” I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m going if it comes to that.

At risk of sounding maudlin or melodramatic, allow me to explain myself:

I’m 77 years old. I’ve had a decent if unspectacular life. I married well with a lifelong partner. I’ve had my ups and downs and more than a few regrets. I’ve done good things and bad. I’ve truly had a lot of fun (I still do!). I’ve spent my life in a flawed country (Aren’t they all?) that has nonetheless tried its painful best to overcome its checkered past and live-up to its noble aspirations. We did our part in blood and treasure more than once to save civilization from world-wide totalitarianism. We’ve been a force for good (not always, but more often than not) around the world. I’ve been very lucky to be able to feel that deserved sense of real patriotic pride. I hope our younger people might one day feel it again, as opposed to the hollow tribal jingoism we now pantomime 🤡 in its place.

For years now, I’ve walked away from the graves of better people than me who had better reasons to be here than I did. As a struggling person of faith, it has sometimes troubled me that God has spared me on several occasions and has not done so for others who deserved better. I can only excuse that to myself in terms of a calling. There has to be a reason 🙏. I hope it doesn’t sound grandiose to say that I think that reason is what we’re looking at right now in these terrible moments for American democracy in this latest chapter of our American story. If I’m here for anything, it’s to do my duty in this moment. So to the best of my limited ability, I will do just that.

I can’t know one way or the other what’s going to happen on the 18th or thereafter. Hope springs, but these are hard times for hope. If worse comes to the very worst or if I end-up ensconced in some Soviet-style American gulag 🙄, this will have to stand as my last word. Let that not signal the end of anything, but a hopeful beginning on our long road back to ourselves.

Somebody had to go up the stairs. 👩‍🚒👨‍🚒

I started my Substack account just a bit over a year ago. Like any new venture, it’s been a work-in-progress. I’ve written 53 stories at last count. I’ve learned as I’ve moved forward. One thing you learn is that it doesn’t necessarily get easier as you go. To the contrary, there are ways that it gets harder. At first, there’s a certain amount of low-hanging fruit: You may have a few stories already in the pipeline, or you may have some interesting topics where you’re emotionally invested and well-versed. These are the pieces that (more-or-less) write themselves in a relatively short amount of time with minimal effort.

Somewhere along the way, these easy targets will disappear. There comes a point where it starts to look like actual work. Light-bulb-style inspiration can carry you only so far (I’ve found this methodology harder as I’ve gotten older). This is where many people will quit. Not to put too fine a sheen on my personal skills (such as they are), but if you can navigate this inevitable turn and continue to produce effectively, you may have earned the right to call yourself a writer. You’ve learned how to chop wood in tune with the basic and time-honored verities of every valued profession.

I’m sure this will surprise some readers, but I don’t think of myself as a purely political writer. My aspirations (again, such as they are) are more universal than that. Of course I work in those daily foaming rapids: That’s important work and I try to make small contributions where I can. I tend to get more👀 on those themes, but it’s a crowded, feverish, and angry place. Taken by itself exclusively, it can rob you of your spirit and dilute your talent. It becomes more difficult with each passing day to locate a personal vantage-point from which to make a unique contribution in that babbling and (mostly) repetitive swirl. You need to reach for other concepts and test different muscles…

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…so I’m here today to write about SHAME. Shame is such a disheveled notion in our disordered contemporary moment that I doubt many of our younger people could use it in a sentence. Here’s the Oxford English definition:

“a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.”

This is the accepted classical definition: You’ve done something you know to be wrong, and you feel the weight of that knowledge. There’s some mixture of guilt and regret, and it’s expressed as intense moral discomfort (what we used to call ‘conscience’?). When shame is earned, proportional to the offense and when one is allowed the possibility to atone, it can have positive effects. Shame (more accurately, the fear of it) is one of the adhesives that enforces societal norms and permits us most of the time to coexist in relative peace with each other.

But shame has an ambivalent character. When I did an online search, the first three entries described it in mildly morbid psychological terms as a malady to be treated therapeutically. It’s possible to see it either way; it’s entirely a matter of degrees and extremes. Shame can certainly be abused and applied in ways it was not intended to be used. It can have connotations of cruelty and bullying. It appears to me on the whole that there has been a shift of the balance in more recent times. It’s come to be viewed more negatively as an issue of threatened self-esteem, and less as an expected and proper internal consequence of wrong behavior.

In any case, it’s clear that shame no longer functions as a reliable guide to behavior in our public life. Bad behavior is actually not new😉. Over the course of my life, I’ve seen some of it and I’ve done some of it (in both cases, I knew it was wrong). What does seem to me to be new is that the absence of even the capacity for shame is increasingly seen not as the psychiatric defect it actually is (ASPD. Look it up🧐), but as an advantageous boost to one’s civic prospects. That’s the real malady.

Before an increasingly cynical and stupefied public, the person who will not compromise their human dignity, their decorum, their principles, or their common sense is at a disadvantage against those who will do those things. It’s become a distinguishing feature of a certain dominant strain of public behavior. Those of lesser standards can appear to separate themselves from their fastidious and overly snooty elitist opponents. They can pretend to the common touch (“I’m no better than you are. I don’t have silly touchy-feely moral notions, just like you don’t!”). And it works 😵!

But it shouldn’t 😠. That we allow ourselves to be manipulated and outmaneuvered by deformed personalities in so many areas of our American life is no credit to the normal rest of us who tow the country in our wake. We should be in charge. We should be making the rules. We may not be able to enforce shame in a blighted place where it won’t grow, but we should certainly have a say in consequences. I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time.

I’ve been revisiting 9-11 🔥 not only in light of the recent anniversary, but also in quest of much more than that. One of the things that always pulls me back is the iconic song the “The Rising” by Bruce Springsteen and his E-Street Band. I’m sure I’ve heard it a hundred times. It never gets old, and it never loses its powerful and poignant emotional pull for me. Every time I hear it, I detect a nuance that I hadn’t noticed before.

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Have a listen, from Barcelona 2002 (It’s really great rock-and-roll too!😎🎸🥁):

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This haunting song bristles with poetic sense and visionary imagery in every line. It’s worthy of Shakespeare. You must be an alert, attentive listener to get the full benefit. Ambiguity and ambivalence abound. There are twenty different lyrics worthy of a Subtack post. I’ve chosen this one from 1:12 in:

“…I was wearing the cross of my calling…” 🎵

The first time I heard that, I was drawn to it (I wish I could say that about everything in the song, but much of it went in one ear and out the other for a long time). What was happening here 🤔? The first obvious thing that occurred to me was a minister or a priest (?). We know there were many clergy of all faiths who served directly at Ground Zero during and after the tragedy. At least one rescuing priest in my memory was killed there on that day. There are evocative themes of afterlife throughout the song. That’s certainly one calling for sure.

That said, the context suggests an alternative: A doomed FDNY firefighter 🚒departing his comfortable home and his loving family to face what would be his final inferno (Was there perhaps a premonition?). The word “…calling…” can be read any number of ways for any number of people. It might be an element of duty or destiny. It can be interpreted in the sense of a gift. All of us carry our own crosses. We all have our callings. It’s our responsibility in the face of even danger and death (if it must come to that) to live up to them.

So maybe all of these possibilities can be true (?).

What we’ve learned for sure is the stark truth that there are things which must be done. When the stakes are high enough, we’re obligated to take our chances even when the odds are against us. There is no moral choice but to answer the bell (Yes, it tolls for thee). We can rise above our instinctive fear and confront as best we can whatever destructive forces are threatening us. We can rise above the normal human instinct for cautious self-preservation and accept that there are higher purposes to consider. We can trust that in the fullness of time and in the full reach of the rising, all will come right.

So I’ve found what I was really seeking 👀:

America today (all of it and every one of us) is trapped in yet another burning building🔥. This latest disaster is of our own making. Do we (all of us!) stand back in our comfortable homes and our easy lives and let others come to the rescue? Are there “…comfortable homes…” and “…easy lives…” anywhere these days? Are there “…others…” who can do that without our help? Can this urgent mission be a cross to bear and a calling to answer only for some, but not for everyone? Who’s going up the stairs this time?

I think I’ve answered that for myself. You can be your own judge.

I realize I’m overdue for a new post. I’m sorry, but I’m in a kind of valley from which I can’t easily extricate myself 🙁. My long and weary journey has reached a place where too many things are lost, and not enough beginnings are taking root. I’ve gone through phases like this before and I’ve always rebounded out of them. Maybe that can happen again, but I don’t count on it. There’s so little time and so little with which to work. The tools are rusty and broken. The heart is wounded and doubtful. The outlook is unpromising.

I’m reluctant to post something so downbeat, but I have a duty to be honest. That’s the highest requirement for anyone who would presume to call themselves an essayist, certainly in these uniquely dishonest and fearful days. I hope you will hang with me as we search for a way forward together.

I so wish our world was in a better place 😢. Nothing can entirely remedy the remorseless verdict of time, but I would like to be able to take with me a plausible comfort that I had done the best I could in a worthy and modestly successful effort. I would like to think I left the stage at some future date with a solid contribution to progress. I would like to think we were continuing an arc toward a better tomorrow for us all. I can’t say at this moment that I think any of those things.

I was born three years after a victorious and world-saving WW2 (I’ve written about all this before) midway into The American Century. That fact informs so much of my thinking. When I was three months old, The Berlin Airlift began to provide around-the-clock relief (at no small personal risk to ourselves) to the two and one half million citizens of West Berlin (our blood enemies only three years earlier) against a Soviet blockade of the city. We broke the blockade in less than a year (a massive logistical achievement toward a heroic and selfless purpose by what I can only hope isn’t the last great American generation).

The Marshall Plan to rebuild war-ravaged Europe was born almost literally the same day that I was, and it continued forward for many years under different titles and thru different administrations who all understood our higher calling in the world. I didn’t know all these things as a youngster, but there was an intangible pride and an earned optimism in the air in those days that manifested itself everywhere we turned.

We weren’t perfect certainly (not everyone shared equally in these feelings at the time), but on the whole it felt pretty good to be an ordinary American. We were given a good place to start by the heartfelt blood, sweat, and tears of those before us. We took for granted that we would live our civic destiny and leave things better than we found them, not only for ourselves but for everyone.

We haven’t. I don’t even get to have that 😠. None of us do in these terrible days of decay and decline. There is nothing in our larger national life in which to feel justified pride (I’m talking about real pride, not the silly chest-beating jingoism of Trump and Fox News). There is only a vapid moral wasteland to stumble across blindly and in perpetuity (for younger people, that’s going to be a really long and depressing odyssey if something doesn’t change pretty soon).

We didn’t leave it better than we found it. Not yet. We made many incremental improvements along the way, but I’m afraid we’ve given it all away in the end. I don’t know that it’s truly possible to recover (Lord willing, we’ll try). I actually feel more like a citizen of post-war Berlin than I do an American today (I know what an American is supposed to feel like. This ain’t it 😠).

I hope this isn’t the end of our story, but who can be sure? This press conference in DC today was buzzed by military planes, on the orders of a maniac whom a bewildered nation apparently granted the authority to do even that. But jet-engines can’t obscure the hard truths that were being discussed there for our benefit and in our name. On the contrary, they spoke even more loudly. To the extent I retain any hope at all, it’s that a new beginning may be taking root there after all. I want to be here to see it sprout, and to see justice at long last fully served.

“Let America Be America Again…” * *Langston Hughes, 1935

I don’t write about this easily. I wouldn’t write about it at all if I didn’t think it was necessary, both to explore for myself and to give my readers a fuller sense of what drives my behavior. As I’ve gone into this story, it’s occurred to me that it’s going to be longer and more complex than what I usually write. It turns-out it’s a story about an era in American life. It’s not only about me. Bear with me if you can, but I’ll understand if you don’t. It’s possible to think this is both arcane and tedious.

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Let’s begin:

Almost from my earliest memories, I can recall regular attendance at First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in my hometown of Mount Sterling, KY. I didn’t choose anything in those days. I went because my parents wanted me to go. I’ve often wondered how different my life might have been if they had simply chosen another church or no church at all 🤔.

Here we are in about 1960 standing on the FCC steps. I’m guessing with the corsages and the rather formal dress that this was Easter Sunday. This was typical of many Sunday mornings. We usually went as a family, “…dressed up…” as they say. This was all very normal for those days. It would foreshadow some very difficult times for my family (and for all of us, really) to come, which is for another story. On these steps on this day, it was a very optimistic and oblivious moment for us and for the country as a whole.

At that time, FCC (DOC) was likely the largest Protestant denomination in town and among the largest in the USA. It had been born originally at Cane Ridge in neighboring Bourbon County in the early 19th century, about fifteen miles from this scene. DOC had spread over much of the country since then. I would guess we had 300-400 people in regular attendance (it wasn’t always easy to find a seat). My first minister (and still among the most memorable) was Reverend John Norton Williams. We lived near each other on Sycamore Street. We played with his kids (His son later became a national leader in dental education and Dean of the University of Louisville Dental School among others. I’ve known some interesting people before they were such 😉).

We also had very active traditional Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Catholic ‘downtown’ congregations, as well as adjuncts of other Christian denominations. Mount Sterling’s significant black population had its own churches (as now). Racial segregation was very rigid in those days. FCC has been among the leaders over time in a small and slow reformation of that tendency.

The rural areas had various smaller churches (then as now), but my impression is that there were a lot fewer of these then than there are today. It seems to me a modern phenomenon that it’s hard these days to find 100 people who can agree on anything to the point they can congregate together in common purpose. The requirement to invent new sects at every turn has added to the Babel of modern life and has clouded the few fundamentals that we were ever able to agree upon.

Disciples of Christ was actually formed in the first place to bridge the many interpretations of the gospel and to unify the Christian community. To oversimplify a complex history, DOC aims to reduce doctrinal minutiae and to recenter Christ in the church. Belief in Jesus’ unique story is virtually the only requirement for acceptance into the DOC congregation. It isn’t a hard place to join.

DOC has an inclusive, progressive philosophy. It has been in the forefront of efforts against racism and in support of LGBTQ rights among other outstanding causes. Tolerance is a cornerstone of its creed. It may come as no surprise to the perceptive reader that DOC has suffered for those stances in our raucous, fractured, (and let’s just say it: dumber modern times): Membership has fallen substantially in the last forty years. That isn’t my concern. My mind is made-up.

It may also come as no surprise that I was personally imbued with these basic tenets as a child. I quite unconsciously incorporated many of them (imperfectly and haphazardly to be sure) into my life’s project as I grew. And it didn’t have to be that way! I’m struck to this day by how purely random choices can have a profound impact. My parents could have chosen a dozen other churches, or none at all. Each path would have differed from what I got (some substantially so and unlikely to be in a good way).

Instead, I grew up innately accepting concepts of fairness and tolerance that were temperamentally difficult for many of my young friends and classmates. To the extent I was bent in a different way (and I think in some ways, I was), it started right there with that first random choice. Everything flowed from that…

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In the middle years:

…but not always in a straight line. I was a normal misbehaving young adult with the usual afflictions and vices. I continued fairly regular church association until roughly my college years. Somewhere in there, it began to fall away. Various societal, familial, and personal centrifugal forces began to pull me away until I lost my grip on it altogether. I never entirely ceased to believe after my fashion. I (actually we, now) just ceased to feel the pull of formal attendance. With no children for whom to set an example and a declining sense of social obligation, the habit just dried-up.

From the period of roughly 1972 to roughly 2012 (that’s ironically forty years of ‘wilderness’ if you’re counting 😉), we were not inside any church excepting the occasional funeral-service or wedding. We attended a service for my childhood friend, fellow long-standing FCC member, and deceased classmate Carole Turley Richardson at FCC in 2011. That event stirred in my mind the idea of returning at some future point in time.

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Rounding the turn 🏇:

It was just about a year later that I made good on that. I still remember meeting my old neighbor Bill Bramblett in the lobby. I recall feeling tense and anxious at first (I’m sometimes socially uneasy at the best of times). It would actually be some period of time before I felt truly comfortable. It wasn’t like it often is in the movies, with the prodigal son returning and all is immediately well. But I persisted and it gradually became easier. Debbie started to go with me on occasion.

It became apparent that while much was the same as I remembered, a lot had changed: Coats and ties were no longer considered a requirement, and in fact were unusual. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see children (even adults sometimes) in shorts and sports shirts. The music programs were more varied and less formal than I recalled. I was actually a bit startled the first time the congregation literally applauded a speech or a performance (That was certainly new!).

The most obvious difference was the attendance: I would guess it to be on average about half what I recalled from the 1960’s. It was too easy to find a seat. The longstanding erosion affecting mainline churches (perhaps all organized religion) was plainly in evidence.

We went about our business over the next few years and all was well. Debbie and I became modest participants in various church activities. We reestablished older relationships and we added a few new ones. Then came 2016.

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The first big hiccup 🙁:

From the beginning, it had been my firm pledge not to allow political differences to enter into what happened under the roof at FCC. I never mentioned political issues myself. When they were occasionally brought up to me, I deflected quickly away. We were and are a politically divided congregation (maybe roughly 50/50? 60/40?) along the usual modern fault-lines. That always struck me as odd given the basic teachings of our church, but there you have it. The first overt test of our ability to remain allied came (as I saw it) with the election of Trump in 2016.

That was very nearly a bridge too far. But by-and-large the consensus held, and we managed to function with reasonable unity. It was a bit difficult for me to avoid seeing some of my church associates in a different light as what I personally saw as Trump’s outrageousness became more and more pronounced. But we managed. Life went on.

And still, a crack had opened. Debbie is a city person from Louisville who never entirely forsook that persona. I had spent fifteen years working at TMMK in Georgetown in a worldwide industrial environment. I was gone more than I was at home. Most of my newfound political activism was centered in Lexington. We were attending UK sports events in Lexington. We were both retired from our work. We were on a gradual trajectory to something else.

Mount Sterling as I had known it in the past had changed right out from under me, certainly over a long period of time. It was now moving more and more into what has become known as ‘MAGA’ culture. Somewhat to my genuine amazement (!?), the Trump influence took hold and gained momentum among what I had regarded as moderate and reasonable people whom I had known and liked for a long time (a lifetime, in many cases). Little by little, we were drifting apart from our comfortable world of 40-odd years of married life there. We decided to relocate to Lexington at the end of 2018. We were in search of a bit of a new start and a recharge of batteries toward the final laps of our lives.

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A strange new world 🚢:

It was never our intention to leave FCC Mount Sterling. We were only 30 minutes away at our new home. In the early phase of our transition, we did make occasional trips back to church. In 2021, we ushered in a new presidency. By all conventional measures, it was broadly successful. It seemed we had seen the last of Mr. Trump (It was unimaginable that he could be elected a second time. Surely, Mount Sterling and the country had learned their lessons, and we were past him forever 🙄).

But the troubling bumps in the road nevertheless accumulated: There was the emerging, lifestyle-shattering C-19 pandemic and all the trouble that involved for us all (still reverberates to this day). In 2023, Debbie’s physical issues became so pronounced that she chose essentially to no longer leave the house. FCC went online and we continued our participation there. Trump continued to be an annoying background presence. Little by little, we were being pulled apart from Mount Sterling over normal elderly physical limitations as much as by anything else. Then came HICCUP 2!

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November 6th, 2024: The American Apocalypse 😵😵:

Given a third consecutive chance to reject Trump outright, we failed (again). Looking over from Lexington, I see Montgomery County for a third time going for him at 70%. Now, I no longer see only an unfortunate aberration. Now, I see a persistent and enduring pattern. It changes almost every calculation in my mind. We’re not only in a strange new world, but we left a strange one behind as well.

We’re still members in good standing of FCC Mount Sterling. It remains our intention to serve our church as best we can, given our current limitations (I’ve explored one or two Lexington churches for back-up, but these are for purely logistical considerations of immediate convenience). We maintain good friends and acquaintances at FCC Mount Sterling. We’ve instituted arrangements for a family inurnment in the new Columbarium located there. None of that will change.

But there are serious questions to ponder. I’m not sure I’ve entirely worked through them to my own satisfaction. How much is required of us in the spirit of tolerance as DOC would define it in this matter? I certainly hope I’m wrong (it’s happened before), but it’s hard for me to accept that our national decision of 11-6-24 is not the death-knell of America as we have known it for decades (it plays-out daily as we speak as I see it). What do I do with that in my own mind? How do I forgive anyone who I might see as complicit in that destruction? What should I make of anyone who even now (eight months into this debacle) cannot see clear to rejecting it?

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I don’t yet know for sure 😕. If you’ve made it this far, I commend you for your patience. I don’t know if I’ve answered anything, but I hope I’ve raised some issues. I’m sure I’m not the only person of faith on earth who is facing this dilemma. I wish you well. I hope we all survive long enough to see this existential crisis through to a better place 🙏 🤔.

“If we aren’t growing, we’re losing” *

*EJS Downs 1

That quote embodies most of what I can say that would be of any use. If you’re really busy, absorb that and you can move along without missing very much. For those who care to remain, I’ll try to expand a little.

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Among other things, we’re in a battle of messaging. Everything we do makes a statement one way or another (for all his shortcomings. Trump has a reptilian grasp of this basic principle). It’s vital that we calculate to send the signals we want to send. If we aren’t doing that, we’re just leaving it to chance. That isn’t good enough for an existential fight in which so much of the conventional frightened, out-for-themselves messaging machinery has turned against us.

Let’s consider the matter of public protests. It’s hard to imagine that these aren’t among the most important tools in the box today. We have a lot of people. There are more of us than there are of them. If demonstrations can become large enough, they can exert a kinetic energy that even tyrants can find hard to ignore. Autocratic repression has its limits.

What element of these demonstrations is most important to the message we’re trying to send?

Is it the speeches? With all due respect, after witnessing literally hundreds of these over the last ten years I can say that speeches aren’t it. Speakers in general are earnest and well-meaning, but there’s a formulaic and repetitive quality to most of them (with occasional exceptions) that won’t do much to move the needle beyond the more attentive of those in close physical proximity.

OK, maybe it’s the signs (?) I think we’re getting warm. Many of these are pointed, clever, and eye-catching. On occasion, you see one that’s brilliant. Because they’re easy to photograph and to distribute as still-shots, the better and more eye-catching ones can provide relatively heavy viral engagement. As an amateur photographer at many public events over the years, I focus on these a lot. I’m interested in one shot that distills an important message at a glance. Protest signs are great for that. But for all their inherent theatrical value, we aren’t quite there. So…what, then?

It’s the numbers! Nothing about a mass demonstration says more about it than how many people were actually there. The June 14th ‘No Kings’ event was reported to have included upwards of five million people (I’ve seen earlier estimates that it was three times that many. Remember when I said the messaging had turned against us? I’m inherently suspicious of self-serving low-balling efforts🙁). Even the minimalist 🙈 estimate of five million makes it the third largest public protest in American history and the largest ever against a US president.

That’s a statement. 👀

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Whatever the actual overall number, I know for an indisputable fact that there were at least three thousand people at the Courthouse Square in Lexington, KY on that day (I was one of them). I’ve attended various demonstrations there over the last ten years, and this was easily the largest such event I’ve seen (Our cringing local media described it as “…hundreds…” 😉😄 🙈 ).

What we see here is a space of approximately 38000 square feet (not including participating areas up and down the adjacent streets) that was so densely packed at its peak that it was hard to walk through it. Do the math.

This is also a statement. If Lexington tracks with the rest of the country, we had a very large nationwide turnout on June 14th, certainly far above average for events like this.

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On June 15th, 2025, we had forward momentum. Virtually everyone who left any of the events of that day left with the conviction that a genuine movement was taking root. We were on to bigger and better things. I wrote the following Substack piece on June 20th (I believed it):

https://ejsdowns1.substack.com/p/in-the-valley-of-no-kings

And yet somehow (after nearly seven more weeks of nearly daily Trump atrocities), we’ve fumbled the ball. The last two events I’ve witnessed here in Lexington were shadows of ‘No Kings’. There was lackluster turnout and tepid energy. We cannot afford this 😠!

We are in an early stage of peaceful uprising to resist a powerful and ruthless opponent who holds most of the institutional advantages. We must not take a step back. I think the small pop-up demonstrations on street corners and in small communities are great, and I applaud those who are taking it upon themselves to do that. We genuinely need everyone’s efforts in the best way they can make them, and everything must start somewhere.

But what we are ourselves promoting as the big events have to actually be that. Once that promise has been made, it has to be kept. If it isn’t, it makes it that much harder to deliver the next time around. We aren’t sending the message we want to send. There’s always a dynamic of momentum (nothing is ever entirely static), but it has to be the forward kind to give us any advantage. If we simply cannot sustain that in this particular arena, we may need to consider different tactics and different rules of engagement. It’s important not to stay with a losing hand (if that’s what this is going to be?) for too long 🤔.

Photo by Diana Kumst on Unsplash

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My latest story started with this article in the Lexington KY Herald-Leader. It’s interesting and beautifully written. It asks questions:

Wild horses

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This puts me in mind of themes I’ve considered over the years: The timeless imperatives of nature vs. the momentary interregnum of a prideful (if oblivious) humankind, living under the mistaken impression that we make the rules; the higher necessities that will inevitably be obeyed; the cruel texture of obsolescence, and who gets to decide about that; the sting of alienation when things turn (I sometimes feel this one myself).

Purely by happenstance, I recently revisited the movie The Misfits. In these hard days, I find a certain comfort in looking back to times and places that gave at least the outward appearance of being simpler, and more noble and compassionate. Days that were so much less cynical. Days that were so much smarter and wiser, and more serious and more honest. These retrospective efforts ground me in a fuller and quieter humanity (If you’re not there just yet, give it time😉).

Filmed in 1961, The Misfits is perhaps most famous as the last film for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Both died unexpectedly not long after the film’s release. The movie’s final scene of these two giants of cinema happily driving away together to a brighter tomorrow would be the last published movie-scene that either would ever shoot 🙁.

It’s poignant to watch this in hindsight. It rings equally with melancholy to hear them muse with detachment about life and death (in character, alongside an also-doomed Montgomery Clift and longtime character actor Eli Wallach) throughout the movie. The thin membrane between life and art has rarely been shown more clearly or more ironically. They thought they were only playing characters and saying scripted words. It wasn’t to be so.

I think it’s also true that the subsequent real-life tragedies overshadowed the film itself for a long time. The Misfits has great and somewhat against-type performances (Gable was truly outstanding), and it delves into many of the themes we discussed above. So why are we talking about this here? Well…it has horses. Wild horses!

The story line of the film is that Gable and his crew (the human misfits in this equation) will go into the Nevada desert to capture wild mustangs for sale. Gable is a lifelong professional cowboy. He had once sold his horses to riding stables and for private ownership. He was proud of that worthy and independent life. Now it’s different. These days, the only market is dog-food producers. No one rides horses anymore.

He’s made to feel a mysterious shame for doing only what he’s always done. The world has moved out from under him and from the horses. None of them understand it. None of them deserve it. In an excellent performance of her own, Ms. Monroe is the ‘conscience’ of this motley crew. She sees through the rationalizations and the moral subterfuge. She feels the pain. As the movie closes, all appears to have ended well. Conversions have been achieved. Redemption is in sight. Right (for once) has triumphed. In hindsight, it might have served us all better if we had stopped right there. The future was going to be harder. It still is.

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And what about the horses? They’re still out there. They’ll do what they’ve always done. They’ll take care of their own. They’ll stoically mind their own business and remain indifferent to human concerns. They’ll do no unnecessary harm. They’ll survive… and they’ll outlast us too, if nature wills it so. 🤔