I just woke up a little after midnight. Indigestion like Scrooge’s bit of undigested potato afflicted me as did an image I’ll mention in the succeeding post. As I sat down to type it I noticed my picnic mate last night had just posted a picture. My grandson had taken it while sitting on her shoulders at Duluth’s Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial yesterday – Juneteenth the holiday we Americans would never have known about until Donald Trump discovered it.
When my daughter and her brother were about the same age I was moved to put them in the family car to join a procession of cars to the Park Hill cemetery where the three men lynched in Duluth one hundred years ago were re-interred at a grave-site that was marked. I am not a person much moved to join crowds. I walked in one anti war peace march against Vietnam. I walked in three marches the year after Donald Trump was elected. A woman’s march, A march on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, And another infused with the spirit that science and truth rather than superstition and paranoia were to be celebrated.
This year I’m running again for Congress as a protest against what has become of the party of Lincoln but I do it cosseted against a virus that threatens me and my wife. I saw my wife intubated and on a respirator a year and a half ago when she underwent a heart valve transplant and a subsequent implant of a pacemaker. She is at greater risk of the corona virus because any infection can overwhelm her system. She has to have antibiotics to have dental work. And besides that she is allergic to most antibiotics. I didn’t mention this in an article I wrote about the time she was bitten by our cat twenty years ago but it made her recovery from an infection one that was challenging. Today twenty years later she is a few years shy of 70 and like me all that much more vulnerable to the corona virus. And I only have five months to go to cross the 70 year threshold. Unlike our President who is busy spreading the virus to win a second term down at Tulsa, Oklahoma I read the science stories. Twenty years ago I had a bout of pneumonia that came out of nowhere and surprised the hell out of me. I was swimming five miles a week back then healthy as can be. I plan to live to be 100 and I am taking Claudia with me as far as I can. We’re lucky ones we can hide from the bug. But I don’t like fighting the pestilence that is Donald Trump from my home. And I’ve got type A blood. It turns out for reasons science is still trying to explain as it has only been known for a few weeks we Type A’s when infected with corona virus are a helluva lot more likely to have a rotten infectious reaction. Every time one of Trump’s dumb lackeys goes swaggering about in ignorant self-satisfaction wearing his liberty like an open sewer I have yet one more reason to challenge Pete Stauber who hasn’t got the guts to face down his wannabe three term Presidential demagogue.
But my daughter wearing her mask with her sons and husband are out there letting the world know that not everyone in this nation is ready to abandon the Declaration of Independence. Abe Lincoln died a martyr to the cause of equality. My grandson who snapped this picture saw it along with his brother saw it on the corner where 10,000 Duluth citizens propagandized by Birth of a Nation felt entitled to gather together to ignore our rule of law to act on primal, paranoia to kill three innocent men just fifty-eight years after Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
From the shelter of my home I’m not running against Pete Stauber. I’m running against a parasite sucking on the teat of one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.
