Happiest day beloved Joy Train Rider! I love you! Bless You! I affirm you are doing well.
I am doing splendidly, recovering from a cold that managed to catch me in last week’s intense activities. I’m grateful that I have the luxury of rest, good nutrition, and effective medicine. I pray for that to be true for everyone.
My heart and prayers go out to all who lost loved ones in the Texas floods. Please check out Robert Reich’s column about how and why that could happen due to the reckless cuts to our federal agencies.
As a writer and your conductor, my mind is almost always busy processing what I’m learning, thinking about how to distill and communicate the most relevant and useful message in the most cogent way. The magic happens when, at a point, the noise stops and I land upon a thought that perfectly encapsulates the potential of the moment. This happened strikingly today.
It is an indescribable phenomenon when one can no longer find terms to describe the actions of a President of our United States. My friend and favorite Substack writer Heidi Cuda put it allegorically months ago:
“They thought they’d reached the bottom. Then they heard the knocking coming from below.”
That’s how I felt when I read The Guardian report from the President’s tour of the new prison camp he has erected in our Everglades:
“. . . he made zigzag motions with his hands while offering advice to anybody thinking of escaping. . . ‘We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Don’t run in a straight line, look, like this, (twirling his finger) and you know what? Your chances go up about 1%. Not a good thing. . .At a press conference following the tour, Trump was equally dismissive of concerns about conditions in the Everglades, where the daily heat index in July regularly exceeds 100F (37.8C). ‘It might be as good as the real Alcatraz. A little controversial, but I couldn’t care less,’ ” he said.
I do believe the present circumstances teach us something major about society, and maybe even the world. We are taught to glorify those that are “rich” and prominent. But is someone really “rich” who spends a lifetime grifting and gorges themself on human misery? I think not.
Now consider the case of Dr. George Washington Carver, the man born into enslavement who did not even know his birthdate, yet gave us this transcendent vision: