Skip to main content

The Year Back 2016

Two Dogs and Mari and Elliot
"There are worse things than losing an election; the worst thing is to lose one's convictions. . . ."  

Adlai Stevenson said that, in 1952, sixty-four years ago.

My life is lived on a much more ordinary scale than that of people who run for the Presidency, but even here, in a small house in Tucson, elections matter, where it hurts.  

It has been a good year, even though gravity has become a more powerful force than when we were young.  More often, I decide not to follow things dropped to the floor, lest we stay there, both.  I mentally map their coordinates.  Of course I exaggerate!  A little.  We shall visit our newest grand-daughter again, soon.  Elliot is evidence that life—just life itself—is a glory.  Jao is almost enough for us to wish life were endless, just to see what else shall be.  Spencer is going to graduate from high school, and Sophie has a driver’s license.  But the list is long, and this is not a recitation.  It is a reflection.

Maybe that is why it is a kick to the stomach to admit that we—we are a nation—elected a shameless man to office, who scorns the human decency that has made us a magnet for whomever can get here to join us in our clumsy admission of human equality, whose ego is cancerous, who provides a focus for our worst inclinations to believe that being white, christian, and male lies at the heart of god and country.  

What is almost worse than the mere indecency of the election result, is what has happened to conversation:  it has been assaulted by people who shout.  I do not know how many times it has happened that, when someone happy about the election says so (often with a reference to, “Throw her in jail!”, or building a wall), and I try to say what the other half of us believe, the conversation is demolished with shouting, and an impermeable wall of anger.  

It is that I lament.  The wall is being built right down the middle of our conversations.  It is a high, thick wall intended, not to confine, but to end conversation.  

There are worse things than losing an election.

In that same speech, Adlai Stevenson said, “I profoundly believe that there is on the horizon, as yet only dimly perceived, a new dawn of conscience.  In that purer light, people will come to see themselves in each other. . . .  It will be the triumph of the heartbeat over the drumbeat.”  

In this small house, we have lost some things this year, not on the floor, but closer still.  But we have found some things, too.  We have begun to recognize, more clearly, the habits of the heart that diminished us, and to see, still awkwardly, what it is we love and want to talk about.  We want to talk about the differences we hold together that make us better, together.  

“Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four?”                                          

                                                  —The Beatles, of course

At a score more than sixty-four, and another til--today, in fact--take a glass with us, there where you are, stating point of view, to seeing ourselves in each other.

Yours sincerely, wasting away in a most satisfying way,

                                                                        Conrad

Mike, Jao, and Kermit
                                                        
Elliot and Her Reasons for Being (Dan and Ellie)
                                                           


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more