Some unrelated musings

So any day now this guy is gonna 'disappear'. He is Gil Smart, and he writes a righteous liberal column in my local paper called Smart Remarks. It was a great column on Sunday, all about our slide into tyranny. He mentions a letter to the editor from the previous week by a woman who wishes for a dictatorship for about 20 years to teach unappreciative Americans a lesson. I read that line about 20 times. How can there be a person in my community that is WISHING for a dictatorship? I think about the movie Hotel Rwanda and remember the people that looked the other way as their neighbors were dragged off into the night for simply belonging to another ethnic group and I can easily imagine this woman looking the other way. Or simply reporting friends and neighbors for speaking out about the government.

We are living in some strange times. I keep wanting to believe that common sense will rule. Cooler heads will prevail. This will all be realized very shortly as the giant mistake it is. Suspend Habeas corpus? Sanction torture? How could we have been so wrong? That isn't the American Way. But I'm not so sure. Anyway, I'm tired of thinking about it.

Sunday was a gorgeous day. After reading the morning papers and fuming for several hours, I decided to throw myself into more useful tasks. The chickens were grateful to be out in the sun and were feeling extra social, following me around everywhere. Except when they were just lazing around, soaking up the sun. They ate many tomatoes yesterday, in addition to two overripe peaches and some aging sweet corn. It was a good day for them.

It was nice and breezy so I washed some curtains that I had purchased and hung them outside. They were dry in about 20 minutes. They are sort of a swiss dot fabric and look cute in my pretty much entirely white bedroom. Gives it kind of a lightly filtered glow.

Earlier in the day I made a little omelet with some fresh eggs and some of my homemade jam on an English muffin. For dinner I made ham and green beans with a baked apple for dessert. The only non-local things were the raisins in the apple and the English muffin. I've got to do more bread baking. How hard could an English muffin be?

In the evening, after dinner, I picked up Maragaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", a book I had just gotten at the library. I've read it multiple times and used to own it (I sold it at a garage sale I think). But hadn't read it in awhile and thought that it seems kind of relevant in these times. If you've never read it, it's about a democratic society that has been taken over by a fundamental religious dictatorship. All freedoms are cutailed, women pretty much have no rights (are not even allowed to read), and the people are governed using fear. Can you imagine? Early on in the book there is a great line between a woman lamenting all the freedoms she has lost and her 'minder', who wonders why she isn't more happy about having no crime and never having to worry about rape (because women are severely limited as to where they can go and must always be with another woman). They are all being kept so SAFE by their government. Keeping them safe from those that want to kill them. The line is "There are two kinds of freedom; freedom to and freedom from. You are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." So that's great people! We're being given freedom from! I guess we're just not thankful enough.