Trickster Trip

We’re in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and it’s been a helluva time getting here.

We left Hamilton on the 15^th on our sailboat Trickster, expecting to arrive that night.

But we’ve endured high winds, a loose shroud and torn sails, and sputtering and stalling engine. We’ve run aground and got our jib line tangled in our propeller. We’ve been rescued by the Coast Guard and chased out of Smuggler’s Cove. And we spent a night bouncing around off an anchored buoy in the mouth of the Niagara river, and spent a night dodging visions of coming loose and wakening as we hurtled over the Falls. (It was pointed out to me that this fate was impossible, as Niagara-on-the-Lake is down river of the Falls. Embarrassing.)

And now we have to turn around and try to make it home without drowning!

And it’s been a WONDERFUL trip!

My Bardzo often teases me about being boring, and with good reason. These days I’m generally happy with my books and lps, Netflix and NPR, and the odd bike ride and takeout from Popeye’s.

She, on the other hand, can be accused of being the antidote to boredom! Meaning, interesting things always happen when I hang out with My Bardzo. And it’s been just that kind of trip. So full of the unexpected. One of those reminders of the incredible richness of the world and of simply being alive and in it.

We’ve spent the nights in beautiful spots, have had wonderful meals on the boat, laugh about Mawa, our cat, waking us every night with her squawking and squalling, have met a handful of really nice, helpful boaters, have enjoyed having electricity, thanks to our newly added solar panel, and even the motor, as tempermental as it’s been, has always come through strong when needed. And the job of diving under the boat, to cut and clear the tangled line was both easy and provided a huge boost of confidence, and plenty of story material for years to come.

It's actually been an intention of mine these last weeks, to consciously feel all of my feelings, especially the fears. Reaching my late sixties has me wanting to prepare for a healthy death. And it's been said - and I believe it - that one of the best ways to gift oneself peace during one's last years is to meditate on death. And this trip has given me more than one premonition of dying, and with them a very clear-eyed appreciation of whatever the circumstances were at the moment. Even with the motor unresponsive and our sails down, and a strong offshore wind of 20 knots pushing us out onto Lake Ontario as dusk approached, the sky and clouds and light were God's gift beautiful. And then, when death doesn't happen...!?

 

Addressing Law & Order

If the Left is going to survive Trump's Law and Order assault, and elect Joe Biden to the presidency, I believe we will have to make an adjustment in how we address that visceral and sensitive issue.

The right - and Trump in particular - has ramped up tension by supporting police crack-downs and encouraging armed militias. They contrast violence on the left as 'mob violence' and as 'destructive', while upholding the violence of the right as 'patriotic' and 'defensive'.

The right is focusing on this issue because it’s one on which they feel they can win. And they may well be right. By stoking the fears of ‘middle America’ as they did so persistently during their convention, they’ve managed to divert attention away from the issues of police violence, institutional racism and the needs for reform.

The right is equating Biden and democrats with lawlessness, just as in the past it has succeeded in equating liberals with weakness, blackness with welfare and crime, and republicans with patriotism and the constitution.

Too often, the Left has been afraid of fighting back, of actively engaging in the war over definitions, over what things mean. This is a case in point.

It's become a white, republican conservative thing to say that you want your streets to be safe. That you want dangerous people to be watched, contained. But liberal democrats of color want these things too. We too want an end to violence in the streets, and want active criminals to be dealt with, at least constrained.

One of the problems is, the social systems of control that make safe streets happen are largely under the control of the right, and they are highly suspect in many communities of the left. Which is why the left has always protested against the agents of the law, as far back as there has been Black protest in America, since the days when slave-catchers had legal authority to kidnap free human beings and re-claim them as some man's property. 

The right keeps wanting to say that the problems of police have disappeared, except for the odd, bad apple. The right wants to deny any responsibility for the state of distrust and for the demands for social justice, reform and defunding the police.

They pretend that legitimate protests have not been happening, because there's nothing to protest in Trump's America. The only legitimate action by citizens is the armed defense of the nation against vandals, looters and those who hate America. It's right out of Rynd's "Atlas Shrugged", a brilliant fantasy novel about godlike heros who overcome the hoards of the weak and servile socialists who want to sap the wealth and vitality of real humans.

The Left can't afford to make the mistake of leaving the definitions to the other side. And we can't win the war - which is already underway; no use arguing about whether anyone wants a war or not - if we won't even engage. We can't afford to focus so insistently on the social injustice issues that we hold ourselves indifferent to the vandalism, looting and attacks on police. That's even if we want the repudiation and defunding of the police. We - and not just the right - have to be willing to recognize personal responsibility. Not just that of a police officer who stands by while a fellow squeezes the life out of a citizen with his knee, but also that of a demonstrator who torches a store, or who doesn't, but who afterwards decides to help himself to the goodies that were made available.

These are issues that cannot be ignored without alienating a large segment of the American voting public. And without eroding the integrity of what the protests and demonstrations are about.

It’s hard for the Left to call attention to the 'disruptors', anarchists and looters whom so many are doing their best to make the symbols of what the Left stands for. I understand the reluctance, because the size and importance of this segment of the left is already exaggerated. And because attention to them has consistently been used to ignore the underlying causes of unrest and protest. And also because we understand the anger about a capitalist system that has consistently 'looted' the poor in favor of the rich, and then uses the law to both maintain inequalities and to punish those who oppose them. And, because much of the violence taking place is caused by policing forces, and by the vigilantes that come out to support them, with the backing of the president and republicans.

But we lose the effectiveness of protest, and ultimately will reinforce the crushing of dissent, if we lose the upcoming election because voters have been too frightened by the prospects of lawlessness and disorder to pay attention to anything else. And if Democrats become identified with an indifference to Law & Order, because our attention is so focused on Justice and constitutional law that we are seen as willing to overlook - or outright forgive - street-level crime and destruction of property, we may truly be inviting a new American fascism that goes beyond our worst nightmares.

I'm not sure how the message "You will not be safe under Biden" will be successfully corrected, but it has to be addressed directly. I think the democrats missed an opportunity during their convention, by not addressing these issues preemptively. I have to agree, as the republicans charged over and over during their convention, that the democrats hardly mentioned the disorder that has occurred - however minimally - alongside peaceful protests. And, by not naming it where it does occur, democrats can be more effectively charged with ignoring or tolerating it..

America isn't going to change overnight - as we should all know by now, especially after witnessing the strong, reactionary lurch backward that began immediately following Obama's election. I too felt a kind of jubilation at the overwhelming reactions, nationwide and worldwide, to George Floyd's murder, and the calls for justice. But I'm not deluded that the celebrity activism of the NBA is representative of the 'likely voters' who will mail in their ballots or stream to the polls on November 3.

Some of those likely voters are already tiring of all the attention on systemic racism - which a great many of them still do not grasp. They may be much more concerned about the rising numbers of assaults and the threat of street violence. And Biden and Harris damned sure better have a lot to say about that. At the very least, Democrats need to point out, again and again, that the violence occurring in America TODAY, is occurring in Trump's America, out of the discord HE has generated.

Can an Entire Nation go Insane? Can an Entire People lose its Soul?

Yet another shooting that defies understanding. But even without understanding, the story will be scripted in scars across a paralysed body, and in the minds of children.

I once saw a young man lose his mind.

One day, he was lucid and clear as water, sharp and smart, cynical and blaming, counting up all the pricks and pokes that daily life sent his way, sure that he was better than all the distained realities that oppressed him, and that he would transcend them.

And the next time I saw him, he was no longer tethered. He’d begun to be prodded by what he couldn’t see, but which he could hear, voices telling him things, scaring him, daring him. His cynicism was now free-floating, detached from the realities I knew, and from those of his girlfriend and community, the world he’d known.

Our communication, which had always been strained by tensions between what was and what ought to be, between the offered and the demanded, it now devolved into desperate lunges at meaning that eluded and shape-shifted us to exhaustion. Until we could only make exchanges of raw emotion, of wanting, or dismissing, of coming or going, yes and no, on and off.

This was a white young man, by the way. This isn’t that kind of oppression tale.

I hadn’t known that sanity could be lost so suddenly.

I watch the news, and the political conventions in the self-proclaimed ‘greatest nation in the history of the world’. And I wonder if an entire people can lose its collective mind, become insane. Does a nation, a community even have a mind? And if so, can it become severely disordered?

A young woman, slippers on her feet, as though she just left her living room. Maybe she plunged through her television screen to enter the drama unfolding blocks away. She is excited, as though she’s just been called up from the audience by a game show host, and now gets the chance to spin the Big Wheel. But she stands in a store, looters smashing display cases all around her, grabbing up plastic baubles and cardboard boxes. Exultant. Exuberant. Not wanting to miss this moment.

A young man, dressed like the citizen-soldier of a Marvel comics universe, transported by duty and super-hero fantasy, for God and Country, protecting property that isn’t his. Filled with fervor and carrying an automatic weapon which will soon leave two people dead.

Two of thousands or millions, talking back in their souls to the talking heads that don’t hear us or each other. Language that will not translate anymore, because there are no rules for translating passion and propaganda into lived, shared truth.

I didn’t know that sanity could be lost so suddenly. When a body cannot reconcile its visions of right and wrong with the world in which it finds itself. When it will not turn down the volume of its own fantasy, to accept why it can never be reality – these puffed-up, animated, choreographed and sound-tracked dreams.

Maybe a nation raised on Batman, Skywalker and Superfly cannot grasp the need to do its laundry. Vigilantes, revolutionaries and citizen tricksters, made into familiar storybook figures, devoid of responsibility or conscience, or the need to step backwards, and to sleep.

Journeying Through My Journals

              Awhile ago, I began generating a list of books I’ve read, and to help me along, I cycled through my journals. I started to journal when I dropped out of college for a year, just before turning twenty, and have kept at it in a very irregular way for almost fifty years now. I knew that here and there were lists of my reading. And even before I started the lists, I’d gotten into the habit of underlining titles of books, so they stood out from the texts. I wasn’t intending to actually read the journals, but I guess it was inevitable that as mentions of people and places and events caught my eye, I would be drawn in, which I was.

              My thirty or so journals were mostly still boxed, from our last move. I used art sketchbooks all those years, the ones with the black hardcovers, and thick, acid-free, unlined paper, so except for the difference in the two sizes I alternated between, they are almost identical. They can hardly be distinguished by wear and tear either, because in later years I began to carry my journals with me instead of writing all my entries at home, making them appear much like the older ones. In any case, in my search for book titles, I picked up the journals randomly, so that I bounced backward and forward through my life, which made for an odd effect. It reminded me of Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s character from Slaughterhouse Five, “unstuck in time” and bounding randomly through his past and future.

My journals are a wonderful thing. For several reasons. They remind me of things I’ve forgotten, including how I felt at the time of an experience, rather than how I feel about it years later, looking back. And, they provide evidence of what a lousy memory I have. Actually, not lousy at all. Just that it does its thing with the aid of some super, creative editing.

I’ve begun to think about what to do with this shelf of books, how to dispose of them. I don’t have children to leave them to, and there’s so much explicit and personal material in them, I don’t know if I’d have the courage to leave them behind if I did. A dear friend once told me about stopping journaling and burning the evidence in a bonfire, and I couldn’t imagine doing likewise. But it increasingly seems possible that I could follow that example.

But here are just a few of the precious memories I came across in my journal scan. Some were all but forgotten, and feel almost like the experiences of an alternate me in an alternate life; others got a detailing from the re-reading that brought them back to vivid life, and carry me back to their time. They make me grateful for the long years, for the experiences that pile up and continue to shape me, for good or bad. They reaffirm for me that I’ve lived a life.

Repeated mentions of a friend, Theo, who called me over and over again during a long period of struggle and sadness, just to see how I was doing, and that she was thinking of me.

A couple, in their fifties, who picked me up on a bitter cold night, as I hitch-hiked north through Cleveland one January. They couldn’t take me very far, but as they dropped me off, with best wishes, they gave me ten dollars, a bible and the remains of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On a long Greyhound bus trip, returning from a cross-country visit with my 91-year old grandmother. I wrote about a young child, Marcus, who crossed the aisle to sit with me and look out the window at I can’t remember what. He shyly accepted my invitation to sit on my lap so that he could see better, his smiling mother looking on. Could that even happen these days?

Getting the beauty of a desert for the first time, as I drove through the Yakima valley at daybreak. Then, decades later, experiencing the Negev and understanding how such a place could give rise to visions.

I bounded from the volume where I went for a 3-day holiday in San Francisco, backward, to the volume of fifteen years earlier, when I lived there for six months. Everything had changed in those intervening years. Especially me.

There was an invitation to a party I gave, with a hand-drawn map of how to get there, because I lived on a hillside, on a crooked, dead-end street. On the back is a list of all the people who came.

I awoke from a dream sobbing, my face and pillow damp from tears. I was awash in sadness from a dream I couldn’t remember. But the feeling that was predominate was relief. I hadn’t cried in years, had felt bottled up. The experience came as blessed release.

Getting off of an Amtrak train on an impulse, a couple of hours before my destination, Raleigh, North Carolina, because I recognized the name of a town as my grandfather’s birthplace. I called a distant relative whose number I happened to have. We visited, and as I left her home, she pointed to the cultivated field next to it. “Have you ever seen cotton?” she asked. I hadn’t. I picked a handful of it, and tried to connect to the spirits of un-named ancestors.

A sudden and surprising one night, sexual indulgence with a young woman I’d had fantasies about. But all the pages before and after are about another woman I was emotionally obsessed with and longing for.

Hitchhiking from Atlanta to San Francisco in four and a half days and eighteen rides. Why was I in such a hurry? My one visit along the way was disappointing. My first girlfriend. Never saw her again.

I was surprised to discover that one period of time, when I was in great personal distress over a relationship breaking down, and another period of time when I was soaring with energy and enthusiasm around my professional and volunteer work with youth, were in fact the same period of time. I never remember them that way.

Taking my Dad with me to my jazz deejay sets at the Dominion on Queen on Wednesday nights during his visit with us. Six weeks in a row. He was in his eighties at the time, and still a charmer and a flirt. For years after that, whenever I ran into regulars from those days, they asked about him and told me what a kick he was.

When I was just starting to write, and was frustrated at my inability to imagine strong plots, I was given a story in a dream. It was complete, beginning to end, and I immediately wrote it down, marveling at the ways of creativity.

Being laid over in Chicago's O'Hare airport for about three hours in the early, early morning. I hopped on the subway heading downtown and was soon on the elevated track going through a working-class neighborhood waking to the day. I got off and had breakfast at the counter of a greasy-spoon, thinking: “These people have no idea that I’m an alien, briefly touching down.”

 

 

Balancing the Books

              What to do with all these books?

              There are so many of them, filling tall shelves all over the house, and stacked on tables and deskstops here and there. And I keep buying more. I love books.

              Years and years ago, after moving almost a dozen times, and going through many variations of book turnover and re-cycling, I gave myself permission to be a glutton about my books, to never discard another that I didn’t want to part with.

              I love the over-indulgence. Love having rows and rows of books I’ve read and remember the joy of discovering, and ones that tantalize but that I haven't dipped into yet. By habit, I organize my books according to size, to be efficient with the use of space, at least. Otherwise, they are shelved randomly, so that I can have a paperback of classic sci-fi short fiction next to a textbook on economics, abutting a recent novel by an unknown that I picked up in a remainder’s bin, then a biography next to an all-time favorite epic.

              But books are dusty and heavy! And down-sizing is going to come, sooner or later. I dread having to move again before I've thinned these shelves! As loved as they are, I begin to think about living without all of these books within arm's reach. And as I prepare myself for that psychic shock, a desire grows to somehow catalog my books so that, once they’re gone, I have a way of maintaining touch with them.

              And Goodreads.com has appeared as a helpful solution. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to list the books I’ve read in my life under the “My Books” tab on the site. I don’t expect to get all of them, but hopefully I’ll be able to sketch out the highlights of a long, soulful connection with worlds on pages.

              In my first two or three visits to the site, I just added books by memory as I could recall them, but I didn't even come up with two hundred titles. Going through some of the ‘Favorites’ lists on Goodreads got me another few hundred. Then, I spent time at my actual book shelves, adding a few hundred more. 

              But I knew that, despite my long ago allowance to myself, there were lots of books I’d read and loved that were neither of my growing list, nor on the shelves throughout the house. And that’s what brought me to my journals.

              Over the last week or so, I’ve been scanning my thirty-plus artist's sketch books, filled with my self-conscious document of my times: my wonderings and wanderings, my steps and stretches toward figuring myself out, with all the jobs, the dreams, the adventures, loves and travels of living my life. 

               Among the photos, drawings, notes to self and ticket stubs in my journals were lists of books I'd read, and I went looking for them.  And I've been finding them one at a time, and each time I'm taken down a side road I'd forgotten, picking up scraps of those different people I've been and have known and lived among. All from the titles of books and their authors' names, sometimes a sentence or two about how the work struck me.

               I was surprised at having failed to remember so many books that worked magic upon me at some time, that had wholly possessed me, had prodded me along my path. But the memories came rushing back. I was more surprised at the so many other books that I couldn't remember reading even after confronting the evidence of my lists and my notes! There is such an interesting contrast between those books remembered in vivid detail, decades after a single reading, and those that are completely forgotten. Of course, it's like that with people, too. And looking through my journals never fails to remind me of the peculiar workings of my own mind.

               It's been a fun way to spend some of my self-isolation time since my jaunt into New York State. I'm enjoying these wonderful, brief visitations with the books of my life, with the other minds that wrote them, and into the worlds they spin. It's a joy I'll never give up entirely.

p.s. One of the small side bonuses of the pandemic has been peeking into the private domiciles of media figures, and those of friends/acquaintances I've connected to virtually. I love catching glimpses of their bookshelves and trying to read a title or two!

A Canada Special

Have you ever found yourself in a group of four, five, six people, and realized that you were each born in a different country? I’ll guess that there are vast areas of the world where this would be highly unlikely, where it hardly happens at all. And there are doubtless other places where it wouldn’t be particularly rare. New York, London, Hong Kong suggest themselves. But I’ll also bet that there aren’t very many places on Earth where this happens with such regularity that it’s almost commonplace. Toronto is such a place.

I’ve never before had a name for this phenomenon. But since I decided to write about it, I think it needs a tag. And because one of my first experiences of it was during a long ago summer in Montreal, I think that ‘A Canada Special’ will do the job.

But what to call it doesn’t matter. Let me get to why I think it’s worth writing about. And the simple answer is that it gives me a feeling for how big, variable and yet inter-connected the world is. It animates my sense of being an Earthling, with roots in the Planet that I share with each of my fellow Earthlings. And I thrill in the random complexity of Life, and the completely random chance that ‘we who gather’ found our ways here, to this moment and place, via such disparate routes and reasons.

So what exactly is a Canada Special? It’s a group of several people that also represents several countries of origin. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a 1:1 correspondence, exactly as many countries as individuals, but that makes it ever more wonderful. We could call that a Canada Extra Special!

                      (image courtesy of 4Chan on Reddit)

That first experience of the phenomenon that I mentioned takes me back to when I was nineteen. A fellow American and I decided to spend a summer in Montreal, and we wound up with jobs selling Colliers encyclopedia door-to-door. Because we had an English language product, and because Quebec was something like 80% francophone, we spent most of our time on crews travelling out-of-province. After our training, we were flown out to join a crew in Halifax. The crew was led by a recently immigrated Parisian and his Canadian born wife. And the crew, numbering about a dozen, had members from Greece, England, Vietnam, Nigeria and India. Eight countries among us. We were all young, and most of us were students, and I remember being so fascinated as we compared notes on our individual slices of the World.

My wife, her son and I form a Canada Special, as I was born in the US, she in Poland, and her son here in Canada.

My writers group is a Canada Special, the five of us landing on Earth via Canada, the US, Scotland, Poland and Hungary. And we’ve had former members from other countries.

And the job I retired from a year ago boasted a staff full of immigrants, from Palestine, Jamaica, Afghanistan, Ghana, India, Antigua, Iran, England, China and quite a few other countries, so we were always forming Canada Specials.

Then there's Regent Park, Canada's largest public housing development, in which I was priviledged to work for several years. The twelve thousand residents hailed from over ninety countries! Imagine the possibilities. Particularly in a community where the youth did not always and inevitably gravitate to their own kind!

This diversity is such a regular part of life in the urban centers of Canada, and it is a beautiful blessing and benefit. I vividly remember my first visit to Toronto, and being tantalized by all the snippets of other languages I heard. I looked at the various brown complexions I came upon and realized it was a different experience than when I’d grown up on New York’s Upper West side. At that time, I’d generally assume that the brown skinned people I encountered who didn’t look African-American were Puerto Ricans, and I was probably right a lot of the time. But in Toronto, an identical shade of brownness could as likely belong to someone from Venezuela, Pakistan, Tonga, South Africa, or to a Native Canadian. Or to some other nationality or ethnicity that didn’t occur to me.

There is something very freeing about such diversity. It softens prejudices when it’s impossible to assume where someone is from. There were many times in those early days when I spoke to someone, assuming them to be a native-born Euro-Canadian, and had my assumption dismantled the moment they spoke with an accent. And I shouldn’t say ‘early days’ because it happened when I first spoke to my wife, ten years after that first visit. And she tells me that people often interpret her Polish accent as French.

Canada Specials are a gift of living here. They nudge us daily out of the lazy assumptions, judgments and generalizations we so easily form about how other people live, think and feel. And in exchange, we gain a richness in perspective and shared experience that broadens us, even when we don’t particularly want to be broadened. It's clear that one of the main reason that people in urban centers are more liberal than those in rural and suburban communities is that the former are exposed to a much broader array of people.

So here’s celebrating Canada, and its cities like Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, which are like microcosms of the World, and which have so much to teach the rest of the World. And may you experience your own little Canada Special, wherever you are!

Conversations With My Neighbor

I live in the Toronto Metro area, a very diverse, densely populated, modern, cosmopolitan city. As might be expected, the politics of the area’s population leans sharply left. And I have a vacation residence about two hundred miles south of here, in the Southern Tier of New York State. Addison is a small village of farms and other small and family businesses. There is a sizable Amish community. The politics here leans sharply right.

When I drive down, I often turn on the radio and scan the am dial. There is quite a bit of religious programming, a portion of political talk radio, and even some stations that blend the two. Though I’ve been making this trip for eight years now, I continue to be astonished that political ‘norms’ can differ so completely over such a short geographical distance.

I met a neighbor six years ago who has helped us to settle in and maintain our property. And though we only have contact during the few short periods I’m down here every year, I’d say that we’ve become good friends. We hang out a bit, share meals and a beer, watch football and toke a little marijuana. We talk a lot, about life and everything in it. We’re close together in age though otherwise our life experiences have been very different.

Politics has been a difficult topic for us however. We tend have opposite opinions on just about any issue. So we’ve learned to tread carefully. We’ve had discussions that have descended into shouted, emotional salvos flying back and forth. And there have been many times, when on the brink of such, we’ve managed to “agree to disagree” and to get off of the subject.

We both see it as absolutely intolerable that the other side might prevail in the upcoming election. He feels that liberals are destroying America and that Trump’s reelection is essential to preventing its continuing slide. I feel that Trump is destroying America and that his ousting is essential to prevent a continuing slide. We both feel that a degree of armed revolt looms as a real possibility if Trump loses, and that in some respects a state of Civil War already exists. I think it’s fair to say that we both realize that his side is much better armed and prepared to fight than mine (as was the case at the start of the Civil War of the 1860s).

We both recognize that it is precisely this – the increasing impossibility of political opponents to even discuss matters civilly – that is at the core of America’s current dysfunction. Actually, it goes beyond that. We seem unable to even agree on the nature of the political universe that we share, or the challenges we face.

This is nothing new. For decades now, the abortion issue has been cast as a matter of the sanctity of life by one side and as the right of women to own their own bodies by the other. On the battlefield however, these positive values become twisted into their negatives: one side is accused of murdering children and the other of oppressing women, hateful charges on which there is no possibility of compromise.

Similarly, gun control devolves from a debate about the right to self-defense balanced against the right to community safety, to a pitched battle opposing those who are insensitive to the random murder of innocents to those insensitive to the loss of personal liberty.

And it keeps getting worse. Language itself is weaponized, and positive values are overtaken by their shadows. Black Lives Matter is translated into White Lives Don’t, and All Lives Matter is interpreted as Black Lives Don’t. Defund the Police becomes Let Anarchy Prevail, and Law & Order becomes White Supremacy Forever. Honest, serious debate becomes impossible when every word becomes a code word for something else. Negotiation can never progress when the worst interpretation of the other’s words becomes the only possible interpretation, when their most feared intentions are seen as the inevitable objectives.

My neighbor and I are at a kind of crossroads. It’s questionable whether our good rapport will continue if we both see the other as bent on the destruction of the country. What may save us is my certain knowledge that he wants things to be better, despite the fact that he envisions a completely different path to reaching better than I do. I hope that he knows the same about me. I know that my life is better with him as a friend than it would be without him. I trust that he feels the same.

Unfortunately, I believe we’re at a point where California believes that the US would be a better country without Alabama, Mississippi or Tennessee. And those states seem convinced that it would be a blessing if California collapsed into the Pacific tomorrow. How shall we overcome?