Playing for Time

***

It’s been an ISH kind of spring so far. Rain-ish. Bluster-ish. Wind-ish. Gray-ish. Not a problem, just a challenge, especially in light of the general bluster coming at us from all quarters. No question, these are strange times, putting a layer of uncertainty under everything, to which the solution seems to be “Keep your head up and keep moving.”

That’s likely the essence of what our college and high school grads heard the past two weekends from speakers who had everyone’s best interests in mind, with one notable exception, a man who kicks balls for a living. This girl is just thankful she can see the TV from the kitchen, because FOOTBALL, man (see how equal-opportunity I am?). And the kitchen isn’t even my territory, it’s the domain of the guy who can REALLY COOK. OMG, we are SO out of compliance with current regs! If the Household Quality Control Department totes us away, please send banana bread containing keys, thx.

So… we’re in hiatus again, with some 28,000 university students mostly gone with the wind. Mass Street, jammed for two solid weekends, is now kinda quiet, kinda slow. This state of being lasts only a couple of months, though, before new life returns and it’s on again: students looking for housing, furniture at the curb all over town, baby freshmen getting their college legs, and a happy Mass Street. Football. Basketball. Bread and circuses, bring it on.

In the interim we’ve consciously broken a habit of several years running, that of NOT watching news on TV. The various shenanigans and happenings have heightened our need to know, so we tune in to trial coverage enough that it reminds me of watching the Watergate hearings on a little black & white TV with rabbit ears while my toddler played and napped.

That whole thing, Watergate, seems so innocent in retrospect. I wasn’t here for slavery (the official version) and I missed the Civil War and both World Wars. By the end of the Korean War I was six years old and just beginning to be cognizant of events outside my small sphere of existence. By the time Viet Nam became an acknowledged war I was becoming very aware of world events and how politics, in the end, shape everything. (See definition of “woke.”) Despite the ugliness and division of that era and my own personal fears, I never really expected to see the globe in tatters and headed for a bad end in my lifetime. Why, I don’t know, because here we are.

**

While I wasn’t old enough for WWII, I fully understand what it was about, and I know its sinister vibe is very much with us right now, this week, underscored by words from a disgraced ex-“president.” Words like “unified Reich” and “immigrants are poisoning the blood of America” and political opponents referred to as “vermin.” Germany doesn’t allow Nazi rhetoric, why are we tolerating it? The language and intent are such that every time I’ve tried to write about it (or anything else) my brain fogs over and tears clog my throat. As a country we’ve never quite been who we thought we were, but we were for sure better than this and the world is aghast to see our crumbling feet of clay because if the U.S. is a sham, how do they maintain hope for their own nations?

I’ll always be a Pollyanna, the girl who looks for the pony in the manure pile, always hopeful, forever optimistic, but I must say it takes a mighty amount more effort to maintain that mental state now.

Can’t we just all get along?