Peak Summer perspectives

In our northern hemisphere, this coming Saturday, August 1, Lughnasadh is celebrated among the Celts and Irish Gaelic. Locally, row crop harvest will start in a couple of months and fruit and vegetable harvest has been underway for a couple of months. Somewhere close to or on August 7 we'll reach the midpoint between between Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox. This sure seems like peak Summer and the weather concurs. Right now the temperature is in the mid 90's (℉) and the humidity makes it feel like 113℉. At least the wildfire smoke has eased away for now.

field corn not yet  ready for harvest

Photo by J. Harrington

The limited cool down forecast for the next ten days may be enough for those Minnesotans who vote in person on August 11 to get over being hot under the collar. Early voters, not so much. Those who pay close attention to the state of the world, the country, the state, and/or the 99% are unlikely to cool down regardless of the weather. I'm reminded of the key theme from Dr. Seuss' The Lorax: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not." I'm here to say it's well past time we all stop voting for Once-lers while we still have a habitable planet to protect! I wonder if we could send all of the 1% to colonize the "Red Planet." (Am I the only one who sees real irony in that?)

At some point we seem to have allowed those who are supposed to represent US to act as though the words accommodate, tolerate, cooperate, and compromise are each spelled with only four letters and aren't to be used in polite political company. winner take all is the antithesis of a democracy, just as is the short-sightedness of not thinking beyond this quarter's profits. How can we be sure to vote only for those who realize we, and our descendants, are all in this for the long term? Your thoughts?

Ghazal: America the Beautiful

Alicia Ostriker

1937 –

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America

The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America

We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America

I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America

School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America

What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America

Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America

Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America

We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America

Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America

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