Being

This piece, released in the middle of the pandemic, sort of encapsulates my mood. Things are looking better, but things are still in that in-between space of movement and quiescence.

I haven't taken many photographs during this time; sort of because it didn't seem like there was anything remarkable to photograph. Life continued in muted colors, against a backdrop of slow-motion train wreck.

A Christmas acquisition for our little back patio

John discovers I Love Lucy (please don't mention American Gods)

John's drive-by 7th birthday

In which he got a pretty good haul

America finally got a president who was interested in helping the country, not just himself

Tommy, after throwing an extended fit about...something

We had a close brush with the virus. Against local guidelines at the time, we had some family over to celebrate John's birthday. We enforced masks and stayed outdoors on our back patio, and that may be what saved us in the end. One of our visitors tested positive for COVID-19 just a couple of days later. Alison and I got tested and were negative. Still, I was forced to miss several shifts at work.

I did end up traveling a few weeks later after my quarantine ended. It was an opportunity to catch up on my reading.

Drive-in theaters were the rare occasion to catch a film

Vaccines slowly made their way through the various prioritization groups. My coworkers notified me that I could get my shot at a mass vaccination site at Cal Poly Pomona. Alison had received hers a week earlier at a pharmacy. A bunch of us went one day and got our first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. I had some difficulty with the follow-up 2nd shot, but I think I got that sorted. At least, I'll find out when I show up for it.

We were invited to take our kids out to a residential development that a friend had worked on. It was a good opportunity to get out of the house and see people we haven't seen in a long while.

Reentry into society is going to be a bit of a difficult thing. For me personally, with the prospect of being vaccinated within a short couple of months, my personal risk is substantially reduced. All sectors of life seem to be pushing to move faster than I think prudent (church, school, work), so now I get to be the stick in the mud. Well, that always was my personality type, I suppose.

Actually, on the topic of school, I'd like to have more in-person learning for the smaller kids, but it seems like the 4 hours we get once a week is as far as we're going to get in the near-term. It will make things dicey at home, because I think Alison is going to have to start reporting in-person soon, leaving me as the only one at home to supervise John, while my own workplace is pushing for me to come back. We'll see what happens...in the meantime, I'm just trying to be.

The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

 I was looking forward to writing a happy Christmas post. I think I'll do that still, but with what we just observed in the nation's capital on this last Wednesday, I feel it would be foolish not to make my thoughts in the moment known.

For context: following election day of November 3, there was a significant delay in declaring the winner in various states due to inadequacies in counting mail-in ballots. There were a lot of mail-in ballots because, yes, there's still a pandemic on. By November 7, the states had reported enough results that all the major media outlets declared Biden the winner. Every single step in our electoral process has been wrung out to its most absurd extreme, with people arguing nits at every corner, making distinctions without any difference. The states don't finish certification of their votes until around early December, following which the electors in each state gather to cast their ballots.

Because in almost every election in modern history, the loser concedes the race following media projections, all these steps are mere formalities. The last exception was the 2000 election where the outcome was difficult to determine in Florida (fewer than 500 votes separated the candidates), which ended up being the deciding state. This time, with margins of 10,000 or greater in each state, the loser cried fraud, not in one state but in several, and specifically, only the states where the loser lost. To further increase the difficulty, only the presidential portion of the ballots were alleged to be fraudulent.

Now, is electoral fraud possible? Sure it is. America has a lovely history of fraud, and as such, has slowly taken many steps to minimize it. Far more common than inventing votes whole cloth, is preventing votes from being cast in the first place. White conservatives have become really good at this by doing things like restricting the number of polling places available to areas where the opposition lives (poor, browner neighborhoods), onerous registration rules followed by purging existing voter rolls, and ID requirements. New to this cycle was the administration's deliberate degradation of the USPS capability to timely deliver mail-in ballots, with the express objective of causing ballots to miss the deadline. Despite these headwinds, the white conservative party lost the presidential election. Interestingly, they gained ground in the House and appeared to narrowly hold their ground in the Senate, although two senatorial elections in Georgia were forced into a runoff. Regardless of these facts, the game was on--massive, systemic fraud had to be the reason the presidential candidate lost!

What followed were months of allegations and lawsuits by the white conservative party, the vast of majority of which underscored how little the party in power even seemed to understand their own electoral system. I say this because of the 62 lawsuits filed, only 1 was ruled in their favor (in Pennsylvania, where first time voters were required to present ID for their votes by Nov 9 rather than Nov 12). The rest were either rejected completely by the court or unfavorably ruled. There was even a desperate attempt by Texas, a white conservative party-led state, to appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn the election because they didn't like how the election was conducted in other states. It was rejected unanimously (conservative pedants rejoice that 2 justices believed that the case should have been heard, although they also wrote that they would not have ruled in Texas' favor even if it was heard). For the massive fraud believed to have been perpetrated on the "American people," no evidence was ever uncovered to prove that the white conservative party had been disenfranchised.

That didn't stop the grievance train from rolling. From the president, to his toadies in Congress, to his red-hatted masses, they worked themselves into frothy rage over their impotence and frustration. Surrogates in Georgia literally declared all elections to be untrustworthy, and that no one should even vote in the Senate runoff. The president and his toadies tried to pump the brakes while the president simultaneously floored the gas on this idea, resulting in a wild political spin cycle that ended with two Georgian Democrats winning the state for the first time since the Bush era.

As each milestone in the presidential election process was checked off, a new desperate plan was hatched to somehow prevent the democratic process from working. The final step, prior to the inauguration of the new president, is for Congress to count the Electoral College votes and formally declare the winner. The date was set for January 6, 2021. Donald John President Trump set up a rally in Washington D.C. on this day to gather in his faithful for one last hurrah to assuage his wounded ego. Presumably, they would give courage to the Trump party's toadies in Congress to object to the electoral votes that they were assembled to count. The objections are permitted, but with schisms even within the white conservative party showing, the Trump portion of the party was doomed to fail as the majority of each congressional chamber must uphold the challenge. The objections would be raised, ostensibly, until a congressional committee can "audit" the election that was audited 3 ways to Sunday in each state. A farce on so many levels, the day was promised to be full of sound and fury but signify nothing but the forgone conclusion of the election.

Instead, incited by the loutish lazy loser of a president, the crowd pressed on to the US Capitol, where the joint session of Congress was assembled. Trump lied about marching with them before slinking back into the White House to watch the proceedings on television. 

The throng pressed against the police barricades, and suddenly, on cue, they cast down their Trump paraphernalia, donned black masks, and shouted "Death to Facism!" Or, at least, according to some in the Trump party, this is what happened.

In reality, dressed in Trump flags and "MAGA" red hats, waving Gadsden and Confederate banners, rioters pushed past the suspiciously small contingent of Capitol Police and into the capitol building itself. Windows and doors were broken, pipe bombs were scattered around the building, including a cooler filled with Molotov cocktails.

The House and Senate suspended their business and sheltered in place or were evacuated to more secure locations as the barbarian horde sacked Rome at the invitation of Caesar. They made off with trophies, posed and danced in offices of the nation's leaders, and they felt like they had won. What they actually accomplished was the culmination of MAGA-theory--unbridled white conservative populism. They brought the rebel flag into the Union's heart in an attempt to stop the business of democracy. Their goal was to disenfranchise over 80 million people because their contingent of 75 million is upset. Never mind that there is disappointment every election year. Never mind the tradition of respecting the voice of the people. The new tradition is to attack the government itself when you're in the minority.

Make no mistake, the Trump toadies were not chumming around with the mob after they breached the security line. Even though they had stumped and rallied for this exact moment, even hours earlier pumping their fist in solidarity to the gathering crowd. The proverbial toothpaste was not going to get back into the tube. One of the few members of the white conservative party that has any scruples is the last Republican presidential candidate that I have voted for, Mitt Romney, who declared to his colleagues that this chaos is exactly what they chose.

Eventually, enough law enforcement was dispatched to expel the revelers. The president-elect called on the sitting president to condemn the insurrection and to tell them to disperse; instead he egged them on with his usual false grievances before begrudgingly telling them to go home and that he "loved" his "very special" Trumpians. The legislative bodies reconvened and eventually counted and declared Biden the victor of the Electoral College, although fewer white conservative senators were willing to proceed with their planned objections.

5 Americans lay dead in the aftermath, more than at the consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. In the weeks to come, many more Americans will die of the virus spread by the anti-mask contingent of Trump's followers in Washington, some who likely had no involvement at all in the events of the day. The unending coronavirus horror that doesn't make good TV continues to be a lasting legacy of Trump's uninterested selfish policies.

Suddenly, the white conservative party is circling its wagons and saying that now it is time to start healing. The cancer that they've fed for years has taken over a major political party. People like Ted Cruz, for whom I must self-flagellate for electing back in 2012, who smugly sit back and say that everything is fine and that the insurrection was an anomaly. People like Josh Hawley, the Missourian who never lost the state's historical mob-mentality legacy, who express support for would-be vandals, then hide from said vandals, and then return to the Senate floor to attempt to overturn an election on their behalf. Cancer must be excised. These seditious toadies of the Trump party should no longer hold any place in politics.

At long last, we have multiple social media sites expelling the rabble-rousers at the top. Conveniently, the white conservative armchair constitutionalists start crying foul for the First Amendment, forgetting that social media sites are private companies. They wouldn't forget this is if it were a Christian bakery denying a gay couple a wedding cake. Somehow, the president is being silenced without his Twitter account, despite having TV cameras and press correspondents swarming the White House. 

All this boils down to a fundamental nastiness of the white conservative party--nothing is a problem if it doesn't harm them. January seems to mark successive nadirs for the Trump administration. The government shutdown in January of 2019 was marked with his supporters complaining that "[h]e’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting." January of 2020 was marked with Trump's impeachment ending in an acquittal by the Trump party, with only one white conservative (guess who) voting to convict him of his abuse of power in attempting to gain foreign support in harming a political opponent. Now, we have January of 2021, where Trump's faithful complain about the police, whom they supported in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 (guess what they were protesting), in an insurrection in the nation's capital. As chaos broke out and the police attempted to prevent the Capitol from being overrun, one "patriot" decried that "[t]hey’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots."

Trump's chickens have come home to roost, and his faithful are finding out, that in the end, it was never about them. It was about him. He dragged the white conservative party along with him, infecting them with his virus, until it is a sad form in an overcrowded intensive care unit, struggling to breathe.

Happy Birthday, Gordon! 36 years old, 8 years of marriage, and 9 months of pandemic.

Happiest of birthdays, Gordon! What an interesting year this has been. Though we won't be having our traditional birthday movie outing or be going to a restaurant of any sort to this year, you are definitely worth celebrating. I am so very glad that in all that this past year has brought, you are here. Thanks for being around and making our world a better place.

So, in honor of your 36th year, more than 3/4 of it in pandemic, here (in no particular order) are 36 pictures documenting what has been on the whole a strange past year bringing the unique opportunity to spend more time together and remember how fortunate we really are. I'm sure glad we've got you, Captain.

And, Merry Christmas!

(Not bad for the first one at home.)

Love you,

Alison

The People United

We are living in an election purgatory in the United States. We have a projected winner with the loser determined not to acknowledge the result. Most Americans are confident that the transition to the new administration will be smooth. It's a luxury that we have been afforded after centuries of peaceful elections. However, the robustness of our free and open elections are not something we should flippantly question.

In November of 2004, Ukraine held a runoff election for president. The incumbent president Kuchma, not running due to term limits, threw his support behind Yanukovych. Yes, the same Yanukovych who was later forced to resign as president amid bloody protests in 2014, and employer of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Yuschenko, a pro-Western politician, was Yanukovych's runoff opponent. The election was held 21 November, and had about 75% turnout.

We Are More Than Polarized Labels

This started as a Facebook post but just got too long. Here is what I am not putting there because very few people would bother to scroll this long in that forum anyway. Still, it was written with my FB friends as the intended audience, and I didn't bother adjusting it.

...

Fair warning, long post. Bottom line, I love you guys, even when (and because) we disagree.

These thoughts have been buzzing around in my head since I put some of them together with other comments on a friend's thread about Covid-19 earlier today, and I'm teasing them out here because they seem worth sharing, though I cannot condense them simply.

Here's the piece from my other post, adjusted slightly:

Talking about things like [politics/Covid-19] on social media is tricky because most people have made up their minds about how they feel and why, and listening to some rando isn't going to change that decision. Those choices are layered by our preferences for and trust in information sources and our desire to fit the norms of our social circles. It is easier to reject a conflicting viewpoint than deal with the cognitive dissonance of rejecting your own. That's especially problematic when we are polarized on such a complex and far reaching issue as Covid response [or politics, or whatever it is].

Here's what I'd like to add to that:

All this to say, if I am friends with you here, it's because I value you and a meaningful connection we share. I love dearly many people whose views are different from my own on things like religion and politics (and I am sure other subjects). I hope by hanging onto and remembering shared affection though our differences, my life will continue to be richer for having people I love and disagree with in it. Thank you for being reminders that we are more than polarized labels. We are people who love a lot of the same things. 

As for discussing hard things, I love to do that. I have also come to the conclusion that this is most effective one on one. Reach out any time of you'd like to do that.

At best, I think the conversations we have about our differences can help us. If nothing else, we learn to hone and better articulate our own viewpoints. But hopefully, they also allow us to respectfully engage with one another on difficult subjects with the understanding that it is OK to have different ideas, and that we can still love and appreciate one another for the reasons we did at the start.

And most importantly, when we can listen to the way someone we care about sees the other side of an issue, it forces us to reconsider our assumptions about people who hold those views and maybe the issues themselves. It broadens our perspective. It strengthens our appreciation and love for others and enhanses our sense of connection and community. 

So even if we don't have those hard, controversial conversations (which is fine -- they can be exhausting), I want you to know I like you, not just because of the ways we are the same. I value the ways we are different.  I hope we can extend to each other good will and agree that the things that bind us are greater than the things that divide us. Where we can't agree, I feel certain it is because we are seeing things from different angles. This graphic comes to mind:

(How dull and unproductive would life be if we  all thought the same way? I believe democracy works well when we share different perspectives because it gets us closer to greater truths.)

Happy Halloween, and happy last week of this 2020 Presidential Election. God bless America and each of us. 

(*steps down from soapbox)

Can There Be Another Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood?

A recent comment brings this title to mind, but I'll come back to it in a minute.

Wildfires broke out all over California, in part due to inaction by our private-public utilities and in part due to climate change. Smoke covered our area for the better part of two weeks, which made for great apocalypse weather.

As the winds shifted and the fire moved farther from us, the smoke cleared and we went to one of the few remaining COVID safe venues, the beach. It was only moderately miserable.

A new food market opened up in town, although not at a great time. Still, the Korean wings truck was one of the highlights.

At last, parks are being permitted to open (not everyone is there yet). We had a small outing in Duarte.

Tommy is in the full swing of school, as is John's half-baked distance learning program. I don't really intend to insult the efforts of John's educators, really it's more of a lament that the format generally works poorly for him at his age.

 Now, the election season is reaching its final days. I've already stoked the fires and generated controversy by the mere mention of ideas contrary to others'. Committing my thoughts and feelings to writing is helpful for my mental health, though, so I guess...trigger warning?

Last night was supposed to be a town hall debate between the two presidential candidates. It got canceled because one of them fell ill with COVID-19 and didn't want to participate in a virtual format. The other candidate decided to proceed with a town hall forum at the same time, with the idea that the sickened candidate could schedule their own once they recovered. Naturally, the most contentious outcome happened--the newly recovered candidate scheduled their own town hall forum in direct competition with the other forum, at the same time slot, inviting a "ratings war" since that is important to the ailing incumbent.

The Democrat nominee, Joe Biden, held a relatively sedate forum, answering voters' questions with rambling anecdotes and long-winded policy dives. Sometimes the voters didn't appear satisfied with the answers. The moderator pressed him on issues where he had not given direct answers, sometimes with follow-up questions. At the conclusion, the cameras stayed on and Biden continued to speak with the voters for at least another half hour, perhaps longer as the broadcast cut out.

The Republican incumbent, Donald Trump, held a contentious meeting, responding to voters' questions with non sequiturs and veritable word clouds of whataboutisms. The moderator pressed him on issues of his record and followed up when a direct answer wasn't forthcoming. Lacking an electoral opponent, Trump directed his bluster at the moderator, coyly denying that he knew what the weird online conspiracy group QAnon was but identifying with one of its peculiar obsessions of anti-pedophilia.

Against this backdrop, I encountered a tweet that stated that Joe Biden's "townhall feels like I'm watching an episode of Mister Rodgers [sic] neighborhood." I paused after reading that, then read it aloud to Alison. We remarked that there was a comfortable, disarming mien to Biden's deliberate responses, not unlike the late Fred Rogers. He wasn't wearing the familiar sweater and loafer ensemble, but he took the anxieties and fears of the voters in the room and did his best to reassure them that he understood their concerns and that he would address them in his administration. It was a refreshing change of pace.

Only a minute later did I learn that the twitterpater was none other than a senior adviser to Trump's re-election campaign, attempting to throw shade on the Biden town hall, implying that he was getting too nicely treated compared to Trump. Trump, who shouted, blustered, and dissembled at nearly every question was a "victim" of the "mainstream media." Let's be honest, however--even if Trump didn't arch his back like the cornered proverbial cat, do you believe for one minute that he would even want an event that resembles Mr. Roger's Neighborhood? Oh, he'd continue his plea to suburban women to like him because he "saved your damn neighborhood," but that's not exactly the kind of neighborly talk Fred Rogers engages in.

Can we be rid of him yet? Can we have another beautiful day in our neighborhood, with someone that actually cares to be a part of it? Not someone who merely wants their support so he can run off to his life of luxury?