Found on our walk – What Are We Seeing? – Photo: L. Weikel
Catch Phrases
It’s funny. I’m sitting here in my usual spot in my living room, allowing the thoughts and feelings generated by the day to percolate and inform me of the topic for tonight. Sometimes catch phrases pop into my head and I run with one of them. Other times I look at the photos I’ve taken during the day and open my heart and mind to the inspiration often whispered (and sometimes shouted) by what they depict.
Tonight there are no photos. At least no photos of clouds or stars or the moon. No photos of Spartacus or Cletus, Precious or Tigger. No sunsets. No creeks or waterfalls or dirt roads.
I write that now, but who knows? Perhaps by the time I complete this essay I’ll grow desperate and resort to including a gratuitous snap of one of my familiars. They have my back that way.
I’m a tad frustrated by my discovery that the two phrases that initially popped into my head have been used by me far too many times already, and all within the past nine months. It’s as if ‘a big week ahead’ and ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ have gestated. It’s possible, I suppose, that the concerns of the prior posts are coming to fruition now.
Big Week Of Shoes Dropping
The events of the coming first full week of 2021 are ‘big’ in many senses, and that’s why I’ve been reticent about issuing a full throated “huzzah!” over the end of 2020. The calendar may say it’s over. But its essence, its chaos and disruption, definitely is not.
Had I written tonight’s post twelve hours ago, I probably would’ve started a recitation of the week’s ‘big events’ with the Senate run-off election in Georgia on Tuesday. It’s pretty huge. The results of this election couldn’t be of greater consequence to the future of our country.
But of course we couldn’t have Tuesday start our Big Week. No. As of this afternoon we all now have access to an hour-long tape recording of our current president doing what he does best: threatening, bullying, and trying to coerce a state official (of his own party, even) to ‘find’ votes that would prove his fantasy and supposedly upend the results of the November 3rd presidential election.
So now we’ll be inundated with that story.
Then Comes Wednesday
We’re all being prepped for an ‘explosive’ day on Wednesday, January 6th, 2021. The outgoing president is all but calling for an armed insurrection. Members of Congress, both Representatives and Senators, many of whom were elected or re-elected in the very same election that took place on November 3rd are stating their intention to protest the pro-forma counting of electoral college votes based on baseless allegations of fraud. And baseless is an accurate description when courts have decided so in 60 different lawsuits. (Would that that were a hyperbolic number of cases brought by DT and his minions. But alas, it’s not.)
Again, What Are We Seeing?
I’m called once again to ask myself – and all of us, really – what are we seeing?
It’s important that we see it clearly, call it what it is, and figure out just exactly what we need to do to preserve the integrity of our country. The time of bullshitting ourselves about the reality that the current regime is trying to talk us into believing is true must end now.
It’s going to be a Big Week, with shoes dropping all over the place. And it’s not going to end this week. So let’s open our eyes and ears.
We must See. We must Listen.
(T-327)