It is a muggy morning here in the Piedmont. A few puffy clouds are evident under the rising sun, but there is that warm moist blanket of air that is predicted to send us over a hundred degrees by noon. I forgot to check if that is “actual” or “heat effect” temperatures, but that does skirt irrelevance. It is going to be a day that features a damp shirt and an abrupt change between our chairs in the great room and the pervasive heat around the metal ones on the back deck.

The Lady in Red, who was wearing something in a deep azure, informed us things will cool off a little in the days to come, but as for today we just need to enjoy Virginia in a sultry return to August. For the evening hours, she says some of the smoke from the big California wildfire may cause our sunset to be an equally vivid demonstration of the power of nature to bring remnants of the destruction thousands of miles east.

There is the natural flurry of climate-related commentary, of course. We appreciate the need to keep hysteria high for a bunch of things, though unfortunately there may be some unaddressed issues. In fact, the continued intensity of the messaging that veers from the COVID panic quickly to Climate Doom and social unrest may be having its own effect.

My pals keep me abreast of some of it. A note the morning included a clip from out west that a former college professor had been detained for arson in several fires out there. Some were in the vicinity of the big Dixie fire, now said to be the biggest in California history. I don’t know why they would use a name fraught with such baggage in these days unless that is part of the messaging. But “Delta” was already taken for something ese. The college prof was reported to be living in his car before detention and apparently thought setting fires would help things.

There is more on that topic, of course. The current nominee to head the vast Bureau of Land Management is a woman named Tracy Stone-Manning. Part of her resume includes the note that she used to be an associate of a group that spiked trees in places like California. The point of that was to suppress legal harvesting, since hitting a spike with a chainsaw blade had the potential to injure workers. The Dixie fire is burning now in forests that were “protected” and thus enabled to build up plenty of undergrowth to burn.

You can see the complexity of all these issues. Climate Czar John Kerry needs to use his private jet to fly to meetings to advocate the rest of us not drive our cars. Sounds sort of crazy, unless his public mission is so vital that the ordinary rules shouldn’t apply to him. Or, by extension, that spiking trees is good for nature, even if it might injure or kill workers. There are higher truths that we are supposed to respect, even if they don’t apply to others.

Which brought things around to the outbreak of violence in our cities, and the scourge of guns. I applied the John Kerry standard to things, but was corrected by an old pal. I tried to find some common ground with him, since we go back a long ways. The closest we got was that what we have is a public mental health issue, and there are all sorts of laws that could be applied to solve the problem, but they are not being permitted.

That got us off the “gun” thing, since we both agree that existing laws, should they be applied, would directly address both our issues on that crisis. But that then led to the “unintended consequences” aspect of just about everything. You may (or may not!) remember when people with mental issues were just locked up for long periods, sometimes for life. That approach solved some things, but of course there were other problems. Some people were unjustly confined. There was a big dispute about that, and for good and valid reasons. The solution? We stopped confining all people on mental health grounds, which now appears to have been extended to some people who practice violent crime as a career field.

That adds to the old problem. Since those days when we saved money on maintaining asylums, we have accepted the result. Which is a lot of people with mental issues are now just living on our streets. Some are in tent encampments, neatly kept. Others are just living the streets. Like, living on sidewalks. In America, where such behavior was once considered evidence of inability to live unprotected.

Oh well. It makes me just want to start whistling some tune from old times. But you know about that sort of public disruption.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com