It feels like summer, and the meteorologic answer is simple. The hot season started yesterday, and will, with increasing humidity, be with us until the end of August. We yell the morning forecast across the fence in the morning to let the entire Writer’s Collective know what they should be prepared for in the course of the day. For this one, sunny skies and the first predicted expedition into the 90s in temperature looms. So, shorts are revealing a variety of skin hues not seen outdoors since 2022.

There has been a lot of talk about the issues that surround the Endless Campaign. There was a bunch of stuff yesterday we were told not to mention. The Mexican Cartel photo of young men with Javelin anti-tank missiles that were supposed to be in Ukraine was just one of them. The Legal Staff has been direct about protecting the company from frivolous legal entanglements, so we are supposed to ignore them.

We naturally agree with that view, since as independent contractors we would be sitting alone as individuals before the Bench, our opinions unprotected by the company, Constitutional free speech, and anything else. It is kind of weird, but we live when we do, you know? We asked for clarification from Legal, and they said anything older than a century probably be acceptable to have an opinion about. So long as we were careful to “disapprove” of anything currently unfashionable.

That, and the aloha shirts and flip-flops around the circle, gave us room for a little levity. Not laughter, or not exactly. We had knocked “Reparations” off the menu for discussion. We do like the phrase that goes along with the matter, and you have probably heard it:

“People alive today should provide cash payments to other living people for the effects of an abominable institution abolished more than a century and a half ago.”

You can see the issues with that. We are free to hold the institution in contempt, since it ended in 1863. We checked Wiki to see how long a “generation” might be, since Wiki is known to be unbiased and universally fair. They say a generation ranges between 20 and 30 years, so those who should be paying would be five generations back, or our G-G-G-G-G Grandparents. None of us, including Wiki, can do the math on that, so we went to the Chairman’s genealogical records to see who might actually be liable for damages.

That was the surprise of the morning. We found her. These were the words on actual parchment about the Socotra clan that had been carried across the tossing Atlantic Ocean in 1858:

Scene – A lodging house in Clifden, County Galway, Ireland
Time – Somewhere Around 1820
Mary Martin married: (First Name Unknown) McDonough, circa 1825

That is the usual one-line note but it was followed with another. “Mary lived for 111 years, and stayed in Clifden.” Her life thus includes five or six generations.

Her birthdate was not specified, but she may have lived in three centuries and stayed put at the lodging house. She had four kids who did not. They became parts of the Irish diaspora and were all on this side of the Atlantic in time for the American Civil War. The parchment has faded, but we counted five young men who served in the war here after leaving hunger back there.

Mary would be the last who probably cannot be charged with collective guilt since she stayed home. Her sons arrived here in North America in the 1850s. They could possibly claim their service in the fight to end the institution exempts them from payment now, if they had not been in their graves more than a century. But at least we would have a place to start the accounting.

Splash was still lit up from our first encounter with this new summer. He was waving his tablet around with a glowing headline that claimed thirty kids in Baltimore had disappeared last weekend. The presumption is that they had been kidnapped or coerced into some involuntary and repugnant servitude that resembles the one subject to compensation under discussion. There is an important difference though. All those people are alive.

Or at least they were last weekend. Like we said, this is all a little complicated.

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