8:10 AM! That’s when I woke up this morning. Its been months since I woke up that late after a long sound sleep. I give my 32,000 cell phone accounted steps yesterday the credit for that.
At eight last night I had four houses to go when the bag I was carrying tore open spilling out my campaign material. Today I patched up a bunch of the gift sized shopping bags I’ve discovered are perfect, other than their fragility, for holding the envelopes that contain my lit. Since my family is in Iowa for the big pot luck supper for Claudia’s family reunion I think I’ll skip church today and work on getting another good night’s sleep with another 30 thousand steps.
I got a call a minute ago. Claudia had trouble paying for breakfast with her credit card this morning and just learned that our card was hacked and is now caput. Thanks Equifax. Also her father got very upset in the sturdy home he was sent to and demanded to go to his own far more rickety home last night. That move was possible because Naples and Ft. Meyers on the Gulf Coast will be taking the brunt of Hurricane Irma.
I read a letter in the Trib today excoriating them for electing Donald Trump because of their mainstream coverage of the news and letting such racists as Eugene Robinson show up on the Editorial Page. I think Mr. Gerdes is a bit off. I agreed they were responsible but tendered a very different analysis in a post I wrote with a very different conclusion. To wit:
I could rest my case with a single editorial that is emblematic of their, finger-in-the-air-to-test-the-wind editorializing – their deplorable failure to point out that one of last year’s presidential candidates was a demagogue and a threat to our Democracy. The Trib was too chickenshit to choose an alternative to the Donald Trump.
I guess that if there is any good news from Trump’s election it is that as a demagogue he doesn’t believe in anything other than himself. Mr. Gerdes isn’t blaming Trump for backing off claim that illegals are rapists. No, he thinks the liberal columnist, Eugene Robinson, is a racist. Gerdes would rather blame the moderate sellout Republicans for letting the DACA dreamers future hang on Congress’s willingness to go along with Obama’s “unconstitutional” executive order. (I haven’t put that well. Its too convoluted but I hope you get the idea. I’ve got lit dropping to do so I don’t want to untangle this paragraph right now.) Where do thinkers like Gerdes come from?
A fascinating story on NPR this morning about a goody-two-shoes patriot gone bad had an interesting insight on the creation of malleable teenagers who become dogmatists like Gerdes. The author, a cousin of the goody-two-shoes, concludes that he’s the victim of too little “liberal arts,” eg. the lack of history being taught in the schools. He thinks it helps explain his cousin’s eagerness to accept nonsense drilled into him during the brutal training he got to become a Ranger. Sound like ISIS anyone?
That concern echoed a conversation I had yesterday as I went door to door. I told one person that I’ve seen our District strip the social studies faculty the same way schools stripped elementary schools of recess. The former denied kids challenges to their pre-conceived thinking the same way the latter deprived elementary kids the chance to run off their accumulating calories. We’re slower thinking and more sedentary and spending a lot of time reading Russian hacker generated propaganda on Facebook. It took Mr. Zukerberg a long time to figure out how to make money on Facebook. Electing Trump is one consequence of his success. That and an indifference to History.
