There is Hope

Hope, like The Dude, Abides

It is difficult to see silver linings because there is a staggering amount of darkness. But the silver linings are there.

The Friday before last, despite the pandemic, hundreds of residents of my small mountain town turned out to show support, peacefully march and hold a vigil for black lives, native lives and all those who struggle for justice in modern day America. Approximately three thousand people claim residence in Leavenworth. The estimated number of marchers - with 99.99% wearing masks - was somewhere close to one thousand seven hundred.

Rural America is showing up and being counted. Leavenworth is not alone.

A week later, about a hundred activists turned out along Highway 2, which runs right through the heart of the faux Bavarian-style tourist town, holding signs and making the tourists, those passing through and the long haul truck drivers aware that the more conservative side of the state was woke enough to care, even though 99.99% of our residents are white. This is not to say there are not the usual ignoramuses, knee-jerk jerks and flaming assholes that populate every section of society, every state in the union and every region in a state but the bald-faced injustices we’ve witnessed lately have cut through the niceties and compelled folks to get off the sidelines.

Did you see the president ‘blink’?

His pep rally to celebrate himself and to give his rabid supporters a chance to spread the virus amongst themselves will not be held on the 19th of June - Juneteenth. It’s a small thing. But you don’t see him or his campaign’s attack dogs back down under normal circumstances.

So, this should be chalked up as a ‘win’.

The Defund the Police movement is lousy framing and phrasing but it has spurred animated discussions all around the country. I just read an article from the St. Louis Dispatch - about as close to middle America as you can be - and the gist of it was that this has long been a bipartisan topic. Because we need to reimagine public safety, we need to break the chains of mass incarceration and we need to eliminate the police as a means of generating revenue for a community.

The gross injustice inflicted upon George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and the thousands who came before them are gross injustices that cannot be denied any longer.

These gross injustices demand a response. A national conversation. A reckoning.

I can think of no better time than in the midst of a presidential campaign where one candidate has the backing of the alt right and the other has the backing of our former black president and the NAACP.

I know at times it feels like Tiananmen Square but I am thinking of these times as like a more successful Arab Spring which will soon give way to a New New Deal.

I propose we skip the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, The Market Crash and the Great Depression.

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I will be taking a hiatus for the next week. Off to the Deschutes River in north central Oregon to introduce a baker’s dozen of eager students to the wonders of outdoor recreation and, in particular, rafting.

Time to disconnect to reconnect.

Time to listen to the red-winged blackbirds trilling from the riverside reeds.

Time to set my clock to the rhythms of the natural world.

Time to get my inner-Ed Abbey on.

“I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a ‘surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow’. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.” - Ed Abbey