So, we enter this morning a new month, the eighth of this chaotic year. It is a treat to be part of a historic event that combines so many astonishing things. It is a half century since mass disturbance last plagued our streets and we torched our central cities. Now, here it is again with some amazing differences. This time, it is the municipalities and the states that are backing their street revolutionary masses. Not at all like 1968.

Lay the plague atop it for some dynamite social frustration, and an epidemiologic community that seems determined to have us all in HAZMAT suits to avoid any possibility of any contagion, plague or not. Life is at hand, with some minor inconvenience, and to oppose what is going on is widely characterized to be in favor of death.

For the record, I am opposed. But the strange season bring strange thoughts. I was going over my G3 Grandfather’s Civil War record the other day. I wrote about it, his three years as a regimental teamster in the trenches around Vicksburg and other southern towns, and his unit, the 72nd OVI. I was doing some calculations in the background, since there appears to be a growing movement to pay reparations for ancient injury to modern descendants who did not experience it.

Since I didn’t, either, I think it is perfectly reasonable that people whose forefathers risked everything in the conflict to end slavery ought to get some compensation, too.

One of the calculations being floated is $20 grand for six years in reparations. I do not speak for other veteran families, of course, but I think a grand per month for combat service seems about right, paid at once, or incrementally.

Taking that sort of pride in the accomplishments of someone I never met led to other thoughts beyond $36,000 dollars. One was about the nature of the Irish immigrants to Ohio, where my Mom was born, as was her father and grand fathers. It shook this Wolverine to the roots, since the barely polite relationship between my home state of Michigan and the Buckeyes is one that fixed my world view over years.

I suddenly came to the resolute and contrary view that Ohio was a good and generous place, filled with people glad to send me either one large check or several sequential ones. I enjoy this new world of Buckeye pride, and will provide my mailing address in Virginia as soon as possible.

The old political axiom of not letting a good crisis go to waste has given us all sorts of social innovation, of which this is just one. It has also encouraged new twists of language to describe them. We now have “Karens” and “Beckies” to guide us through public conduct. It is as though we have elected a particularly intrusive Homeowners Association who calls only after dark.

The other thing about the fifty-year cycle that is playing out is the passing of generational influence. The Boomers, spoiled as we were, were a link to their parent’s half century of leadership that incorporated lessons of survival through a massive depression and a catastrophic global conflict. The collision of values with their children was painful, but we all survived, just as I assume we will survive the passing of the Boomers and the rise of whoever those people in the streets might be.

As you can see, my brain has been freed. The rain has stopped for a moment at placid Refuge Farm, and some of the anxiety it cloaked is free to dry and float away on a humid breeze. I have decided to lean forward toward the new world and take what it is going to be like.

I am not going to go to the streets and fight. The arthritis won’t permit the mobility necessary to engage in effective action. Instead, I am prepared to be entertained by what is going to play out. The election will provide the pivotal issue that will determine the future, but that is only a means to mark the transition. It is coming anyway, but this will be a convenient bookmark in the process. I intend to enjoy it, like the new landscape without statues of the people who made this astonishing nation from whole cloth.

As I said, I intend to follow and enjoy it. I am sure there were people like me who watched the Revolution, waiting to see where the cards were going to fall. There were also people like my G5 Grandfather who just picked up a rifle and got on with the war against the King. To maximize enjoyment and reparation from this transition to an unknown new world, you can do either. But I think those who actually went should get compensated through their great-great-great-great-grandchildren, right?

Isn’t that social justice? I would forward my mailing address for the checks, but you know how that goes these days.

This is going to be great, unless it is not.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
http://www.vicsocotra.com