Today is the Celtic feast of Imbolc. In Celtic country it would be the first day of Spring. Here in the North Country it's mid-Winter and snow is falling. We're a month from the start of meteorological Spring and about seven weeks from astronomical Spring (locally Friday, March 20, 2026 at 9:46 am CDT). At least the temperature is beginning to moderate from the well below 0℉ we've been experiencing for days.
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| when ICE melts it flows away
Photo by J. Harrington
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It's also the first day of Black History Month. This year is the 100th anniversary. We as a country and as a collection of peoples continue to battle, 250 years after declaring independence, on the proper interpretation of the phrases in that declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
In a couple of weeks it will be Valentines Day, a fine time to acknowledge that Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for all (men) are at the heart of what America keeps trying to be all about.
Too many of US try to insert a parenthetical (white) ahead of men and apply only a literal interpretation to that three letter term, erasing the Bill of Rights and the 14th and 15th amendments to our Constitution. Since this year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding, it seems highly inappropriate to regress to making a black person equal to 3/5 of a white and rescinding the rights of women to vote, bodily autonomy, and health care.
Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. It's forecast to be cloudy until almost 10 am tomorrow in Punxsutawney, PA, so maybe Phil won't see his shadow and we can look forward to an early Spring and an accompanying destruction of ICE and the other negative forces supporting a kleptocracy of autocratic oligarchs who would turn US into a nation of slaves. We can do better!
I look at the world
Langston Hughes
I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face —
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.
I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face —
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind —
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.“I Look at the World” by Langston Hughes, copyright © 2009 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Langston Hughes and International Literary Properties LLC.
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