What a morning! Up just past 0600 as the ambivalence of the pre-dawn Piedmont faded into a warm and golden dawn. A massive high pressure airmass embraces the land below, the greenery is nearly full and the fresh-cut pastures are welcoming in their lighter green abundance. It promises to be an excellent country day.
I was going to talk to you this morning about the return of Brood X. It is the shorthand term for the massive outbreak of squiggly but impressive-looking bugs that comes around four times in an average American’s lifespan. I have an amusing story that goes along with it, since it has a tongue of magenta madness to it, just like the rest of our lives. I got distracted from finishing it with the warm golden glow of today’s dawn, and the small but electrifying flood of electronic messages from correspondents spread across the world, and for whom the daylight was already hours old.
The news was strange. One report included an account of an initiative from a part of the country still in darkness. Several counties in the state of Oregon have announced their intention to live their current state affiliation and join another. It is secession, of a sort, not quite the same as the one originated regionally a century and a half ago. It is more akin to our recent one that burst out last summer. That one seemed to be about establishing what the organizers claimed to be ‘autonomous zones’ in several major cities after fairly significant social disturbances. Some commentators strongly urge us to remember that 1968 was much worse. I only remember that order was restored eventually by a government that swore to keep us safe.
This morning’s news from the Pac NorWest was more about people in the countryside saying that the policies of the cities no longer reflected their values and history. Their preference is to join other states more favorable to their view as integrated operating units, following what we knew as the American system.
In an odd way, the unrelated cicada story popped up. In that one, the index-finger sized intruder caused disruption to otherwise normal conduct, and nearly caused tragedy. But that is our nation at the moment, and the analogy appears inescapable.
There is a generational aspect to it all, of course. It has by nature a lot in common to the ones we Boomers have seen in our lives, and inflicted on our elders. I have found myself with a rising compassion for what the Boomer parents went through. Having survived a major social dislocation in the Great Depression, men and women were called to an effort that involved great personal hardship in defeating the Axis powers.
Having raised us in the post-war era of plenty, they were irritated by our sex, drugs and Rock n’ Roll attitudes. They were alarmed by the melt-down of our civic centers that followed the murder of Dr. King. With a backdrop of the war in Asia that continued for years after, it is only now that we can appreciate the anguish of seeing what our parents saw. Their children and grandchildren in the streets, protesting and burning what had been a seemingly rational world.
Having spent a working life devoted to the destruction of the Soviet system of oppression, it is kind of weird to see it happening here and to us. But with youth there was the determination to do something about it. Now, with age, there is only the desultory hope that our magnificent day will not end.
At the beginning of the awful year of 2020, we knew there were historic changes coming. Here they are.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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