Mitt Romney: Reality Check

Is there anything sadder than Willard "Mitt" Romney wearing blue jeans, trying to convince himself, and us, that he is just an ordinary, good guy who understands our situation because he, too, has drunk coffee from a paper cup? Once. Just recently, in fact.

He understands the mania for NASCAR, and the Indy. He has friends who own racing teams. Like many of us, he as "flown on an aircraft". Most of us, of course, fly on airplanes, but who are we to quibble? He has been unemployed: not a job in sight, living from unemployment check to unemployment check.

What he does not have, and might have no way of recognizing, is a reality check.

When my mother died, somebody in the family decided that I should have my mother's jewelry box. That is it, above. There is a little spring-loaded, rusty button that opens the lid. Inside, there was just a nail buffer, although all of us siblings have seen Mom open that box, all of her adult life, to see a couple of rings, and a watch; not much, but every treasure she had.

Today, there is a ring in there, too. A simple little ring with a patch of gold. She told me once she was going to give me that ring, but she never told where it came from. I still do not know, but I suspect there might once have been an awkward boy, about her age. I never saw Mom wear that ring, but she did, sometimes, pick it up and look at it before she put it back in "her jewelry box".

Inside the sagging lining of the cover is stamped:

MERRICK & RACE

JEWELERS

1201 PACIFIC AVE.

254 ELEVENTH STREET

TACOMA, WASH.

The Tacoma Public Library archives indicate that the building, to the right, "is the former home of Merrick & Race, Jewelers: I wonder if my mother ever went in there, or if, by chance, the little box is as old as her marriage? 1930. I believe it was in the early 1930s that Buster Brown Shoes moved into the building.

I, myself, am of 1931 vintage. All of my fingers are too large to allow me to wear the little ring. Too many table saws and arthritic knuckles. So I keep the little, what-seems-to-be paper-mache box as a reminder of who I am, and who my parents were. It is useful knowledge: whenever, for instance, I hear a politician rail against all the poor people of the world who want to come here to make their lives better, I remember Mom's "jewelry box", and that we were an immigrant family, too.

Mitt Romney does not have such a jewelry box. He surely has jewelry boxes, and rings to put in them, but he does not understand.

He does not understand.

Comments

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

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