Friday, May 06, 2016

Sun and light haze today. The air is not yet warm.  Breakfast was out because I had forgotten to make oatmeal last night.  If you don’t plan you pay. Some time was spent cleaning up the kitchen before the trip off to the place for the morning meal. If you don’t act you pay.

Breakfast was as breakfast mostly is oatmeal.  Dried apples garnished it.  A pinch of brown sugar sweetened it.  A couple of pecans made it savory.  Coffee washed it down.  

The short walk from the breakfast place to my office showed me two things.  First humankind always seems to have a plan for anything in nature that seems unused or under used.  Maybe builders have a mantra, “build higher, build denser, reduce the cost per square foot and maximize the profit of rental units”. Cranes are popping up a nine story building where there used to be a couple of pole barns and a large parking lot. The construction I saw going on is a striking change to a landscape that has remained relatively stable for 40 years.

Second nature always puts on a show.  I took a photograph of a tree covered with white blossoms last Friday.  Today all the white blossoms are on the ground browning in decay.  However the tree’s canopy now appears golden from all the little stems apparently covered with pollen (or some kind of residue) that remain from the points where the blossoms had previously been.  Life is a parade of change.

The final thing I notice today is that our leaders are weak and rely on their biases and our fears to rule.  One headline after another in a paper abandoned at the table I sat at focused on punishments being enacted against marginalized groups. Why because the people we elected don’t like the color of their skin or the cadence of their voices. You could almost hear the terms lazy and shiftless hidden in the rhetoric. There was no problem solving, no statesmanship. All that was there was retribution for perceived wrongs of 40 years past.

God if you are ever oppressed and economically abused don’t ever riot.  Fifty years later and tired old white people are still trying to exact revenge.