Over the past 3 or 4 days my early morning brain has been assaulted repeatedly with plethoras – plethoras of ideas. Sleep might have been more comforting because the thoughts all jockeyed to turn themselves into blog posts…….I did family time instead. The grandsons stayed with us three nights in a row. No blog posts……just a head on the verge of explosion as Thanksgiving, Christmas decorating, a jigsaw puzzle and a couple of family movie outings paraded past.
When I first heard the word “eclectic” back in junior high I decided I was one just as I decided I was an “autodidadact” long before I learned my hero, Abraham Lincoln, was one of the best exemplars of self education.
It being Sunday I heard NPR’s On Being again at 6AM. It was a rebroadcast with two musicians Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn. I had enjoyed it the first time and near the end remembered vividly Ms. Washburn’s singing of an old Labor song Come all ye coal miners.
It has lyrics that ought to send a shiver through the hearts of Republican corporatists who won the votes of so many cast off union members in this election: “…see what the dirty capitalist system is doing to you and me.”
I found a youtube of the song with Washburn singing accompanied by musicians from far flung parts of the world. Its the first song you hear on this youtube snippet:
I’d highly recommend it to any discouraged Democrat hoping to replace our next president with a better trump card.
I suspect that for the next four years much of my eclectification will be directed at how to deal with what I fear may become a political malignancy. I keep looking for silver linings. I heard a plausible one on NPR yesterday from Mikheil Saakashvili, former President of the former USSR Republic Georgia who futilely pleaded with the west to intervene before Vladimir Putin invaded his new nation. Despite Trump’s shrugging off NATO, Saakashvili suspects that Trump will be more than a match for Putin.
