Whitewash, or not?

The Better Half [BH] and the Daughter Person have spent a large part of the past week or so making fruit cakes. Today BH has concocted some sort of fruit and nut paste which failed my personal taste test. I've never been a fan of fruit cakes. Wasn't a fruit cake the origin of re-gifting, the same cake getting passed around year after year after...?

Meanwhile, the fields behind the house are again covered with several inches of wind-scoured snow. Let's see, fruit cakes, snowy fields, esoteric food treats, we're approaching the Holiday Season! Time to get in a "holiday mood." Thank heaven for places like REI [BH is a member.] We're all aboard with their Black Friday #optoutside initiative. We're sure we'd be in a better mood if we spent more time outside playing, as well as doing chores which, when we were younger, we sometimes found ways to turn into play. Remember Tom Sawyer and the fence painting?

So, now a question becomes, could some Tom Sawyer philosophizing be applied to bridging our urban--rural divide? As the inimitable Art Cullen, editor of the The Storm Lake Times put it today (An electoral map awash in red)

The urban-rural divide is vivid as ever. If it can’t be closed, the very idea of American democratic liberty remains challenged. There is a palpable resentment among those left behind from the economic coastal juggernauts that finds its expression in terrorist rubes from the sticks dressed in Hawaiian shirts planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan and execute her to start a civil war. Believe it. Most of us are not ready to pick up a gun. But it keeps racism bubbling. It erodes trust in institutions, like our courts or elections. It prevents us from solving existential crises like the pandemic or, even more threatening, global heating.

Tom's strategy keyed off of the idea that to make something worth coveting, it needs to be seen as difficult to attain. Now we all have taken democracy for granted for so long that it seems easy and therefore not worth working at (see also Sawyer about what's "work"). As things stand today, we are all going to have to work like hell to get back to a fully functioning democracy that's a world leader. 

how would a definition of "urban" differ?

Photo by J. Harrington

Perhaps that's the message we should be finding in the number of articles by political pundits who are busy point out the flaws in both Democratic and Republican strategies. In fact, since today is Veteran's Day, formerly Armistice Day, it's probably a good day to remember the words of one Winston Churchill:

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947

Liberty

By Archibald MacLeish

When liberty is headlong girl

And runs her roads and wends her ways

Liberty will shriek and whirl

Her showery torch to see it blaze.

When liberty is wedded wife

And keeps the barn and counts the byre

Liberty amends her life.

She drowns her torch for fear of fire.

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