Back to Reality, Such That It Is.......

Ah,where to begin?  I have been 'offline' for about two or three weeks now for some R and R.  I spent a week with some buddies on a 38-foot sailboat flitting around Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay and having some modest adventures as only a 69 year-old man can do.  It was fun even though there was hardly any wind.  Thank God for 'motoring'.  I successfully put my back out while twisting in many unusual ways to help docking, mooring and placing bumpers so we wouldn't scratch the 'rental'.  I am still trying to recover from THAT!

Now I am in the NC mountains at a family cabin for the next two weeks.  Sweet tranquility and time for my jangled sciatica nerve to quiet down.  Today is the 'bucket list' experience of a lifetime, watching a total solar eclipse from my deck which is in the path of totality....looking forward to that today!

I suppose the best news is that for the past two weeks or so, I have not felt compelled to comment on the disintegration of our government.  What a horror show!  It was very easy during the sailing trip to disengage from the daily spiral of bad news.  I confess I did squeeze in an hour of MSNBC a day to feed my need for some awareness of what was happening, but overall it was truly liberating to only be thinking about wind, and how to keep from falling off a pitching deck.

But now I am back in range of the television and grimly watch the unearthing of the most fetid of human ideologies' reappearance in a place where it was never supposed to be.  The image of Nazis parading in our streets while our President suggests there are some really fine people in this group is almost too much to bear....marching and intimidating the congregants at a local synagogue no less!  Would all the veterans of WWII who gave their lives to extinguish this cancerous plague on humanity be a bit upset by this?  Apparently 'our leader', who has not one whit of brain cells to retain any history-- except of course the ridiculous bubba meisah that General Pershing stopped terrorism by killing Turks with pig blood coated bullets, thinks these are some fine people.  True colors emerge, don't they?

I must admit that it has been refreshing to see hints of actual concern on the part of our Congressional Republicans, although I wonder if it is too little too late.  This whole Charlotteville incident does seem rather like a 'tipping point' of sorts.  Whatever fantasy people might have had that Trump is a salvageable human being has been perhaps irretrievably lost.  Let's hope that some adults will now take the helm and figure out how to right this ship before it hits the iceberg and sustains an unfixable tear in its hull.  At the very least maybe they will figure out how to minimize the damage until next year when we have an opportunity to send some adults to Washington and regain control of our country.

However,  let's not forget for a minute that every moment Trump and his minions retain the governmental controls over our society, they are changing things for the worse, polluting our environment, denying our most vulnerable citizens constitutional guarantees, removing safeguards instituted to protect us from greedy and despicable humans.

The mass fleeing of major segments of our society from further support for the 'disease called Trump' is a hopeful indicator that sanity, the Constitution and separation of powers may actually be the salvation of our teetering democracy.