#196 / Who's To Blame?

  

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Presumably, I do not have to go into a great deal of detail, for anyone who reads this blog posting, as I provide a comment on the sad story of Graham Platner, who is pictured above. 

Platner, a Maine oysterman, just recently won the Democratic Party nomination for the United States Senate, in the State of Maine, and Platner was set to take on Maine's incumbent Senator, Republican Susan Collins, this Fall. Maine tends to vote Democratic, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for Platner, and it looked like Platner would probably win in November, giving Maine a Democratic Senator, and perhaps giving the Democratic Party a majority in the United States Senate. Obviously, as is always true in politics, there were no guarantees, but that what lots of people were predicting.

Alas (at least for Platner, and possibly for the politics of Maine, and possibly for the politics of the entire United States of America), the scenario just outlined has collapsed. Shortly after he won his primary victory, a former girlfriend accused Platner of rape, and although Platner denies the truth of that charge, the accusation seems to be pretty credible, and many of Platner's supporters (including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) promptly withdrew their support for Platner's campaign. Platner has now removed himself from the Senate race in Maine. 

So, who is to blame in this sad story - other than Platner, of course? Well, Bruce Neuman, a resident of New York State, not Maine, fired off a letter to The New York Times, which The Times printed on July 9, 2026. Here is Neuman's analysis (emphasis added):

To the Editor: 

The issue is not what lessons can be learned from the rank candidacy of Graham Platner for the Senate but the sheer incompetence of the Democratic Party in allowing him to get this far. With so much at stake and with the signals of a problem candidate apparent, how did this guy even get through the process? 

We are at a dangerous point in American politics. Corruption abounds, as do moral issues that are seriously testing what kind of nation we are. Our aspirations have unfortunately often been vastly exceeded by the reality of our actions since our founding; what was a steady trajectory upward in our more recent history has all but evaporated. Comparisons can now be drawn to other failed states. 

The Platner candidacy was the most recent example of where we now stand. We look pathetic.

Bruce Neuman
Water Mill, N.Y.

Here's my comment on Neuman's assignment of blame. It appears, from the way that Neuman has phrased his letter, that Neuman is suggesting that "The Party" should pick candidates, instead of "the people" picking the candidates. 

If politics is held in significant disrepute, nowadays (as I think it really is, and as Neuman suggests that it is), one big factor, in my view, is the dominance of our politics by our political parties, which appear, all too often, to be largely funded by, and largely to represent, those who have a lot of money. In fact, "The Party," whichever "Party" it may be, is really in charge of our politics. That is the premise that underlies Neuman's letter. The editorial that appeared in the July 10th edition of The Times, and particularly the headline - "The Democrats Can't Go On Like This" - also seems to confirm that voters should expect to be given the choice of candidates that "The Party" approves and has presented to them. This is not, in my view, how best to achieve genuine "self-government."

In case that phrase, "self-government" isn't self-explanatory, "self-government" means a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," as Abraham Lincoln so wonderfully phrased it. That "by the people" part is actually the most important. "Self-government" means something quite different from having the ability to vote (even acknowledging how truly important that is). "Self-government" means that many of us (ideally all of us) are personally involved in politics and government, in some way - and that we are involved ourselves. We, the people, should be picking the candidates whom we believe will best represent us. A potential candidate's party designation is often relevant, but we should be picking the candidate, not "The Party."

Our political parties are supposed to take direction, not give directions. At least, that's the way I see it, and I think that ceding authority to "The Party" to decide who is going to represent us in our governmental bodies is to sacrifice, ultimately, the possibility of a self-government that can accomplish what that phrase promises. Instead of blaming some others, those with "authority," we need to move on from that and take a look in the mirror, and then do just what Michael Jackson says: "Change."

If mistakes were made, as in Platner's case it seems that such mistakes were made, WE, the people, the voters in Maine, made those mistakes. Instead of trying to blame "The Party," let's all take a hint from Michael Jackson, and look in the mirror! Click the link to hear him sing the song!

We've got a big November coming up. 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/opinion/graham-platner-maine-senate.html

#195 / Hermon Husband, Revolutionary Hero

  

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Which image best tells us what Hermon (or Herman) Husband actually looked like? And who the heck is Hermon (or Herman) Husband, anyway? Wikipedia says Husband's first name is spelled "Herman." The New York Times Magazine, and author Woody Holton, says it's "Hermon." 

Well, let me return to this more important question: Spelling issues aside, "who the heck is (or was) Hermon (or Herman) Husband?"

Though our Fourth of July holiday has passed, I am still reading and thinking about that 250th anniversary of the signing of The Declaration of Independence. July moves on, but I'm still stuck on July 4th. As someone who majored in American History in college, this only seems natural. 

For those who weren't aware of this, virtually the entirety of the July 5, 2026, issue of The New York Times Magazine was devoted to a series of articles that The Times called, "Visions of America." I am making my way through that special edition of the magazine, and I am also still reading another special section of the July 5th edition of The Times that was focused on "six sentences that have shaped the American story." Clicking those links I have provided should give you access, even if you're not a subscriber to The New York Times. [And for those who aren't, but who might like to read The Times, from time to time, let me remind you that anyone who possesses a Santa Cruz City-County library card - free to County residents - gets free online access to The New York Times].

As someone whose favorite book is titled, On Revolution, I like to think that I am pretty well-versed in the history of the American Revolution. However, until I read those "Visions of America" articles (seven articles, by seven leading historians, focused on little-known revolutionary leaders), I was not really aware of how little I actually did know. I commend the series to you!

Hermon Husband (I'll use The Times' spelling) is described by author Woody Holton and The Times as a "radical pacifist who inspired the first armed rebellion of the founding era." I was most struck by Holton's description of how Husband worked to make sure that actual power would be available to "ordinary Americans." He was, in other words, someone who worked to provide the kind of real political power to ordinary people that would allow the nation actually to be governed by "we, the people," not just by "the elites." 

In case you haven't been reading the news, this is a real problem today. Elites of various kinds, from the billionaires on down, are actually the people who are "running the place." In the United States of America, that is not the way it's supposed to go. Hermon Husband knew that, right after the American Revolution disposed of British rule, and we've still got the same problem today. I identify with Hermon!

Read up. Maybe you'll identify with Hermon, too.

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Image Credits:

(1) - https://thewayofimprovement.blog/2012/12/17/herman-husband/

(2) - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/22/magazine/american-revolution-hermon-husband-william-tryon.html

#194 / Three Flags, Coffee, And A Poem

 

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On Sunday mornings, I walk from my house to the Santa Cruz Quaker Meeting; it's about a mile. Quakers are known, officially, as "The Religious Society of Friends." At the end of the Meeting, I walk back home. Before I do walk back home, I always get myself a cup of coffee, which the Quaker Meeting kindly provides. 

Yesterday, as I walked along, I encountered a couple of flags, and they put me in mind of another flag, from somewhere else (some pictures are below). Those flags tell a kind of story about our community, or so it seems to me. 

As for the poem, by Danusha Laméris, formerly the Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, someone had placed a copy of that poem on every seat in the Friends Meeting, before the Meeting began. Her poem stimulated quite a few lovely comments during that Friends Meeting yesterday.

A Flag From My Neighborhood

A Flag From A Nearby Neighborhood

A Flag From Somewhere Else

Small Kindnesses

Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

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Image Credits:

(1) - https://grateful.org/resource/small-kindnesses/
(2) - (4) - Gary A. Patton, personal photos

(5) - https://danusha-lameris.mykajabi.com/

#193 / Intimations Of Immortality

 

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"Intimations Of Immortality" is a famous poem, by William Wordsworth (pictured above). The full text is at the bottom. You are invited to sing out this poem, to get into the flow of the cascading words, and to hear the poet find in the remembered visions of his early life an intimation of what may be coming on, as this life gives way to whatever it is that follows - whatever may await you, too. And me.

Candidly, though, not everyone provides a testimony equivalent to that which Wordsworth shares with us in his famous ode. Intimations of immorality, maybe, as opposed to "immortality," appear much more likely to abound: Public servants, for instance,  who use their office to make money for themselves - and for their families - are all too commonly found, in even our most important offices. And cheaters, too, of various kinds - those who cheat on their lovers and partners, or those who cheat on academic tests. There is such an abundance of opportunity to cheat, isn't there? That is another familiar category in which our intimations all too often ripen into the certainty of "immorality," as opposed to "immortality." There are many more examples of how this life provides intimations of immorality. Feel free to add them in the comments!

Wordsworth, though, is not the only one who has had the transforming intimations of immortality he reports in his famous poem. Feel free to add your own experience in the comments, should you have shared any experience like his. While our material selves, by themselves, seem to proclaim that "this is all there is" - and I have friends who tell me that this is their strong conviction - others may be more like me, one whom the poet's words have swept along, bringing me into both remembrance and vision, too - just as he says: 

Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

I hope such visions do come to you, from time to time, as I can report they have come to me. But whether or not such visions come, or have come, and whether or not they be illusions, or the true and reliable report of realities beyond our common sight, let us celebrate this life while we are here and while we live. 

And as for what comes next, whatever intimations we may have had (or haven't had - or will have yet): Fear Not!

oooOOOooo

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

BY: William Wordsworth

The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
(Wordsworth, "My Heart Leaps Up")

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learn{e}d art
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.oooOOOoooTo Subscribe, Please Click This Link

Image Credit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth

#192 / Slow Down... [What CEQA Requires]

 

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This blog posting is about the California Environmental Quality Act - better known as CEQA. Simon & Garfunkel, and one of their most famous songs, have a direct bearing on this topic (but you might have to be a little patient to get to that part of what I want to say). 

Serious lawyers read the "Advance Sheets." Click this link to be directed to published and citable opinions of the California courts, right after those opinions have been published, and before they have been bound together in the kind of lawbooks you can consult in the local law library. What you will find if you do check out that website link is a set of recently published decisions of California appellate courts (from all over the state) - decisions that determine the constitutionality and establish the judicially-approved meaning of the laws passed by the legislature, among other things. Like I said, serious lawyers read those decisions!

Not everyone really understands how our legal system works in actual practice. Our laws, for the most part, are legislatively-enacted - but that's often only a first step. While laws are legislatively-enacted, initially, they are judicially-established in the end. Anyone wanting to know "the law," needs to read the statutory statements found in the codes that classify legislative enactments and group them together to make it (relatively) easy to know what the Legislature has said about a particular topic. As an example, you can click here for a link to the California statutes. If you do, and look into the "Government Code," you'll find that it outlines the powers and duties of our governmental bodies, including local City Councils and Boards of Supervisors. Want to know something about our traffic laws? Try consulting the "Vehicle Code." Etc.

However, as I said earlier, looking through the Codes will only get you so far. If you want to know with any certainty how various code provisions have been interpreted - and thus how they are actually applied to real life situations - you will need to search through the various court decisions that have adjudicated how the codified laws are applied to real-world activities.

As an environmental attorney, I am particularly interested in any court decisions that construe the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. You can find CEQA in the California Public Resources Code. Just click this link to get to those code provisions. I started thinking about CEQA back in early June, when I read a court decision that outlined some limitations on who could bring a successful "CEQA lawsuit," challenging a governmental action based on the requirements of CEQA. In fact, you pretty much have to act promptly, if you want to use CEQA to challenge some government activity that might have an adverse impact on the environment. Here's a link to the case that got me thinking about today's blog posting (and about how one of Simon and Garfunkel's most famous songs really captures one of the important tasks of CEQA). 

Those reading this blog posting probably know Simon and Garfunkel's famous 59th Street Bridge Song. Click the link at the end of this blog posting and you can hear them sing it. As far as I am concerned, the very first line of the song is what CEQA is all about: 

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

It is my opinion that "slowing down," fully to evaluate the possible environmental impacts of proposed governmental actions, is good for us! That is exactly what CEQA requires. 

CEQA also requires a governmental body that proposes to do something that might adversely affect the environment, to respond, directly, to any public comment raising a concern about the proposed action, as part of a legally-required environmental impact review. Again, I, personally, think that's a good thing! 

Just in case you haven't had this experience yourself, let me tell you that elected officials often fail to address concerns expressed by members of the public, or comments made by members of the public. Sometimes they do address those comments, of course (that's good politics), but they don't have to. There is no such legal requirement - unless CEQA has kicked in and requires that an EIR be prepared, before project approval. If a development is proposed in your city neighborhood, for instance, and you believe that the proposed project would create a traffic danger, you and a hundred other neighbors can raise that concern by letter, email, and public comment, and the City Council Members hearing your concerns do not have to respond and address those concerns at all, EXCEPT... if the proposed project is subject to CEQA. If it is, then the law will require that comments made in the environmental review process must be addressed and responded to, substantively. If they're not, the courts will reverse any approval of the project. 

People are impatient. They don't want to "slow down." They don't want to take the time to require that demonstrable environmental impacts be reviewed (and that they be eliminated, or mitigated to the greatest extent possible, if found to exist). Developers are impatient. Elected officials can be that way, too. 

But what's best for the "long run"? I'm with Simon & Garfunkel. What is so often true, as our government starts making decisions, often at the behest of those with a big financial stake in "getting something done," is that we make mistakes, or fail to do our best, because we don't take the time to make sure that we have thought it all through. 

There's a remedy for that (in general), as Simon & Garfunkel remind us with their song: 

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

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Image Credit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QwxTXGSLWQ

#191 / More Than A Creed

   

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Walter Russell Mead, pictured, writes the "Global View" column that is published each week by The Wall Street Journal. On July 7, 2026, Mead's column was titled this way: "America Is More Than A Creed." 

You are invited to click the link, to read the entire column. Mead's basic point is that we, as Americans, are "one people," but not because of any ethnic, or religious, or comparable connection, and not on the basis of any common "creed" to which we all conform. 

I particularly liked Mead's quotation from the preamble to The Declaration of Independence, which he cites as evidence that Americans were "one people" even before we won the revolutionary war, and established our current government, as set out in The Constitution. Here's that quotation: 

"When in the Course of human events...it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.... (emphasis added)."

We are "one people" not because of any ethnic or comparable connection, and not on the basis of any common "creed." We are "one people" because of the political choice we made to announce ourselves as such.

That self-determined self-definition was challenged, but was then then renewed, at the end of the Civil War. 

Abraham Lincoln identified, in his Gettysburg Address, the nature of that "political choice," that political choice that has made, and makes us, "one people."  

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth (emphasis added).

Our connection, as Americans, the thing that makes us "one people," is our commitment to a government that is "of the people, by the people, and for the people." That commitment is being challenged today. It's up to us who are alive today to make good on our 250 year-old commitment to self-government. 

That means that we need, each one of us, to find some way take some action that will help make sure that our government continues to be "by the people." By US!

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/america-is-more-than-a-creed-9c61f5d0

#190 / Channeling Dear Abby

   

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Dear Abby,

I have a Facebook Friend who posted the following message on her Facebook Profile Page, on July 4th: "NOTHING TO CELEBRATE HERE." Another one of her Facebook Friends responded as follows: 

We have a plethora of strong resistance organizations, affinity groups, NO kings Indivisibles that are thriving doing well developed strategies of resistance in every possible way. Even the local 4th Parade had one of the largest contingent groups with message of fighting fascism. I see so many, many folks who have not been radical in the past taking step for fighting the regime. All of those folks are worth celebrating. MSNOW had a great 4th hour long townhall on fighting and resistance that was excellent [emphasis added].

My friend then responded this way: "Oh yes, I celebrate those fighting fascism. Just not celebrating the birthday of this horrible country" [emphasis added].

I care about my Facebook Friend, and this Facebook exchange caused me some real distress. I don't, personally, think that our country should be defined as "horrible," though I do think it is true that the United States government has done some horrible things (right from the very start), and is continuing to do some horrible things on an almost daily basis. I have always believed in that "Better Angels" approach, and I think we should, as Americans, work to make the country better, and particularly because we do claim to want a system of "self-government," which really says that "we, the people," ARE the government, and ARE the country. I do think that's true, and we are not, in my opinion, all "horrible." 

I write a daily blog posting, and my blog posting from yesterday, I think, is relevant to this way of looking at things.

Do you have any advice on what I might say to my Facebook Friend, in response to her claim that our country is "horrible"?

A Concerned Friend

Dear Concerned Friend,

In many different human situations, a commitment to "forgiveness" is an essential supplement to the kind of direct action needed to deal with bad behavior. In my opinion, we need to take action to oppose - and to seek to rectify - bad behavior by our government (which is, indeed, bad behavior by ourselves). But since we are, ultimately, supposed to be in charge of the government, we need to move beyond our past (and present) failings as we work to do the right thing. What is most important is not what has been done in our name, in the past - or what is being done in our name right now - but what we will do, now, to change all that is horrible.

Defining our nation as "horrible," as opposed to putting the spotlight on various horrible actions of the country, and seeking to change our bad behavior, is not, in my opinion, the best way to mobilize our energies and efforts to transform the future, even as we must never forget the horrible things that our nation, and its government, have done in the past, or may be doing today. 

 

        Abby 

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#189 / Wearing The MAGA Hat

  

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Pictured above is Marty Embry The link should take you to Marty Embry's Facebook page. I don't know Marty Embry personally, but one of his Facebook postings was shared by one of my own "Facebook Friends," which is how I came across Embry and the Facebook posting that I have reproduced, in full, below. 

The Facebook posting I am sharing recounts Embry's experiences after he decided to "put on a MAGA hat for seven days straight." I encourage anyone coming across my own blog posting to read about Embry's experiences. Here is how he wound up his posting: "I went looking for the enemy. What I found was a country full of people making desperate calculations in a system that has failed too many of them for too long."

Before reading Embry's posting, I already knew that you can't judge a person by his or her hat - or by his or her color; or by a person's ethnicity; or by their gender; or by their chosen gender, or by their religious commitments (if any); or by their lack of religious commitments; or by any other observable thing, or any "fact" about them. My experience (not to mention my "bringing up") has convinced me that "Judge not" is a pretty good rule when we encounter others. That's Jesus speaking, by the way, according to the Bible in Matthew 7:1). I mention this for any who might be tempted to think that judging someone by way of their religion is the right kind of rule. To the degree that we might need to "judge" a bit, from time to time, a person's actions, not their accouterments, are generally the best indication of what one's judgment (tentative, always tentative) ought to be. 

I have written before of my mother's admonition that "comparisons are odious." That's a different way of cautioning against the kind of hat-based judgments that Embry is writing about (and other such judgments, hat-based or not). Here's what I say: 

We're In This Together!

We are in this together in the United States of America. And worldwide. That's the lesson we have to learn, and learn how to implement. At least, we have to learn that lesson if we want to prosper - or even to survive!

oooOOOooo

Marty Embry's Facebook Post: 

I did a quiet social experiment that opened my eyes even more than anything that I've ever written.

I put on a MAGA hat for seven days straight. Grocery stores. Gas stations. Walmart parking lot. Youth sports. A barbershop. A dinner table. I told nobody what I was doing. I kept a journal of every meaningful exchange.

What I found on both sides shook me to my core.

Let me start with the Red Side. The first thing that surprised me was the warmth. Not hollow, nodding warmth, but immediate, chest-open, you're-one-of-us warmth. Day one, a white man at a gas station off I-40, work boots caked in drywall dust, pointed at the hat and said, "Hell yeah. Don't let 'em break you, brother." He called me brother. I held onto that word all day and tried to figure out what it cost him and what it cost me.

At my friends sons game, two fathers in MAGA gear walked up, introduced themselves by first name, handed me a cold Gatorade from their cooler, and within four minutes were talking about Biden's inflation, the border, and how "nobody talks straight anymore." They never asked my name again after that first handshake. I was categorized as safe, aligned, one of them. The hat was my passport.

But as the week went on, the welcome got more complicated. By day three I noticed the acceptance came pre-loaded with assumptions, that I hated the same people they hated, laughed at the same things, believed the same version of history. One man, educated, articulate, small business owner, told me over barbecue that "Blacks who get it" are the most important people in the movement. He meant it as a compliment. I sat with it like a stone in my chest.

In the barbershop, a man started telling me unprompted that January 6th was "way overblown" and that the "real insurrection" was the 2020 election. When I pushed back gently, just asking questions, his warmth cooled instantly. Not rudely. The door just closed. The hat had opened it. My questions closed it. That told me everything about what the hat actually buys you: entry, not belonging.

Then theres the other side. If the red side surprised me with its warmth, the blue side devastated me with its contempt and what made it devastating was that most of it came from people who look like me.

Same day as the gas station. I walked into a grocery store I've shopped in for years. A Black woman, probably sixty five to seventy, beautiful silver locs, the kind of elder I was raised to respect, looked at the hat and looked at me and shook her head slowly. Not in anger. In grief. Like she was mourning something. I nearly took the hat off right there in the produce section and explained everything.

A deacon I know, a man who has prayed over my family, walked past me without speaking. He saw the hat. He kept walking. I called his name. He turned, nodded once, and kept going. We have greeted each other warmly for four years. The hat ended four years in three seconds.

A young white woman in a coffee shop with a "Protect Democracy" sticker on her laptop stared at me for a full minute. Not subtly. She was running the algorithm of who I was supposed to be against, what I was wearing, and coming up error. Then she looked away with visible disgust. She didn't know me. She didn't ask. She decided.

Black fathers that I have mentored kids alongside, men I respect deeply, were visibly cold. One pulled me aside and said quietly and directly: "What are you doing, man? You know what that hat means to our kids." He wasn't wrong. Not even a little. But he didn't ask me why either. And that assumption, even when it comes from love, from history, from real pain, is still an assumption.

Here's what I have to be honest about: their reaction was rooted in something real. The MAGA hat is not a neutral piece of clothing. It carries the weight of family separations, of "very fine people on both sides," of voter suppression, of January 6th, of Project 2025.

When people reacted with pain and distance and grief, they were reacting to history, not just to me. I understood every single one of them.

What troubled me was the speed. The willingness on BOTH sides to stop seeing a person the moment they saw a symbol. That is not a left problem or a right problem. That is an America problem.

This was the week's most surprising discovery.

A retired military officer, white, conservative, lifelong Republican, asked me almost immediately to take the hat off. "I don't wear that," he said. "I vote Republican because I believe in limited government and a strong military. Trump is neither of those things, really. He's a TV show."

He voted for Trump twice. Would likely do it again. But he had zero illusions about who the man was.

A former Republican state party volunteer told me over dinner that she was privately horrified by January 6th, thought the family separation policy "went too far," and worried about what Project 2025 would do to federal institutions. Then she said: "But I can't vote for someone who wants to raise my taxes and take my guns. So I stay." She paused. "And I hate that I stay. But I do."

This is the piece the left often refuses to see. There is a significant portion of the Republican coalition that is not MAGA, does not worship Trump, cringes at his cruelties, but calculates that their policy interests are better served by staying inside a broken house than building a new one. You can disagree with that calculation. I do. But dismissing those people as fascists means you never understand them and you never get a chance to reach them.

Now, for the receipts, because feelings don't get the final word, facts do.

Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse by a federal jury in 2023. He was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the first U.S. president in history convicted of felony crimes. His administration separated over 5,500 children from their parents at the border. Hundreds were never reunited with their families.

The January 6th Select Committee concluded he "summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame" of an attack that left 140 police officers injured. Project 2025, written by his own allies at the Heritage Foundation, proposes dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating DEI programs across the federal government, and replacing career civil servants with political loyalists. His 2017 tax cuts sent 83% of their long-term benefits to the top 1% of earners.

These are not opinions. These are not media inventions. These are documented, sourced, on-the-record facts. The receipts exist.

Sunday night I sat in my car in the driveway for twenty minutes before going inside. The hat was on the passenger seat. I looked at it a long time.

I came back to my Democratic values, but I came back changed. More honest about where my own side has failed the communities it claims to champion. More clear-eyed about the real complexity of the people across the line. And more committed than ever to what I know is true.

The Democratic Party is not perfect. It has made promises to Black and working-class communities that it has not kept. I say that out loud and without apology.

But I also see a Republican Party that has been captured by a man with 34 felony convictions and a civil liability finding for sexual abuse, a man whose allies have written a blueprint to reshape American government around personal power. I see voter suppression dressed up as election integrity. I see my children's history being scrubbed from classrooms before they even get a chance to learn it. I see what these policies do to real people in real communities, communities like the one I come from.

So I am back. With both eyes wide open.

I went looking for the enemy. What I found was a country full of people making desperate calculations in a system that has failed too many of them for too long.

The hat is in a box. The lesson is not.

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#188 / Wind Phone

 

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Welcome to the Wind Phone

 

In 2010, garden designer Itaru Sasaski of Otsuchi, Japan put an old telephone booth on his property with a disconnected phone as a way of coping with the death of his cousin by calling him, "on the wind." 

Shortly after he'd installed what he called the Wind Phone (Kaze no Denwa), Sasaski's community faced a massive earthquake, and in 2011 he opened the phone booth to the public so those grieving friends and family members lost in the disaster could "call" their loved ones. 

People all over the world were moved to follow suit, and there are now several hundred wind phones around the world, including around 400 in the US. 

Feel free to make a wind call to a loved one.

oooOOOooo 

You can find a Wind Phone in Santa Cruz, California, where I live, by taking a walk along Branciforte Creek. The Wind Phone, pictured above, is a comfort, and it's a very nice walk along the creek! The Wind Phone along Branciforte Creek comes with the advisory that I have copied out, above. 

Feel free to make a wind call to a loved one (wherever you may be).

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#187 / What "Created Equal" Means In America

 

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal....

The statement above, from the Declaration of Independence, is surely known to almost every American. Probably, most Americans would also agree that the following redrafting of the language better conveys, to our contemporary ears, what our Declaration means to say: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men persons are created equal....

As a preliminary comment, it is worth noting that the statement does not claim that all American persons are created equal. My gosh, as written out in our Declaration of Independence, this statement would seem to apply to immigrants, too. Even "illegal" immigrants!

While we are all thinking about that, let me refer anyone reading this blog posting to a column in The Wall Street Journal, published on June 17, 2026. The column, by William A. Galston, is titled, "What 'Created Equal' Means in America."

To cut to the chase, the main thing to understand is that "equal" is not equivalent to "the same." That is the key to understanding what our Declaration of Independence is all about. We - persons in the world - are all "different." That is pretty much "self-evident." Given that we accept this self-evident truth, then what in the world is our Declaration trying to get at? How can that "all persons are created equal" assertion be justified or understood?

Check out Galston's exploration of this topic (and I note that clicking the link I provided above is supposed to let even non-subscribers read Galston's column). Galston is saying that we are all of "equal worth." I agree with that - but let me go just a bit further. 

The Declaration of Independence was a statement, made more than 250 years ago, and its claims were made in the context of a political revolution. I read the Declaration as asserting that the only legitimate government is a government that must treat everyone "the same" when it comes to their participation in the task of self-government.

The Declaration obviously states a revulsion against any form of political discrimination - discrimination based on race, or gender, or wealth (or any other difference). We are not "equal" in the sense of "the same." Quite the contrary. We are all "different." But our Declaration of Independence says that the Americans who were separating themselves from the government of Great Britain, and from the English King who claimed a right to "rule," felt it appropriate to "declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Our Declaration outlines what was wrong with the King's government in England, and more than anything else, the problem the Declaration made clear in a general statement, before listing specifics - was that the King's government did not allow everyone to participate, equally, in the government that so profoundly impacted their daily lives and their future existence. 

My own reading of The Declaration of Independence sees it as a statement about the kind of government to which the American Revolution aspired - and that those who pledged themselves to the revolution understood to be their objective. 

"Self-government," was their objective. And self-government means (as Lincoln summed it up at Gettysburg) a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." 

The Declaration was "our" claim (our claim both collectively and individually) that the government that determines how our collective lives will be arranged must be a government that assigns an equal role to everyone in the decisions that will shape our future, and that determine our present.

I read The Declaration as a pledge of our individual and personal participation in making that happen, too. 

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#186 / When The Deal Goes Down

 

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At one time - five years ago, but maybe it's still true - Ringo Starr said that his favorite Bob Dylan song is "When The Deal Goes Down." Here it is, in the official Bob Dylan video, on YouTube: 

Ringo, according to that article I have linked, thinks of the song as a "beautiful love song," and "very romantic." And it certainly can be heard that way (check out the video; that interpretation fits).

Still, as I so often find when I listen to Dylan's music, I hear a song that is telling us about God's love for all of us. When I hear Dylan sing, "I'll be with you when the deal goes down," I hear echoes of Matthew 28:20, in the King James version of the Bible: 

Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

I find I keep coming back to this song. I have written about it before, and, in fact, more than once, and it's on my "Memorial Songs" playlist. You can review the lyrics below, and see what you think. I have highlighted some lines in the last verse, which I am naming now as my favorites:

oooOOOooo

When The Deal Goes Down

 

In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light
Where wisdom grows up in strife
My bewildering brain, toils in vain
Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around
We live and we die, we know not why
But I'll be with you when the deal goes down

We eat and we drink, we feel and we think
Far down the street we stray
I laugh and I cry and I'm haunted by
Things I never meant nor wished to say
The midnight rain follows the train
We all wear the same thorny crown
Soul to soul, our shadows roll
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

The moon gives light and shines by night
I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O'er the road we're bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard a deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

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