waking up

It’s a good week so far, I’m enjoying it, yesterday seemed especially good from start to finish

though this week is going slower than usual, by this time last week it was Friday afternoon. 

Six-twenty and there comes a sizable ship through the Pass and in far channel headed for the hairpin turn. Within five minutes it’ll pass right close to my porch. Yep.

BBC Romania, 325’ long x 46’ beam, carrying general cargo, arriving from Tampico, next port New Orleans.

Still on all minds, terrorism arriving home for its vengeance. A discomfiting likeness to the beginning of the end for other empires that have fallen in history, in my mind in particular Rome falling to pieces from within and without and the Third Reich collapsing for atrocities on all fronts. Our zenith was, I don’t know, the peak is jagged, maybe the last third of the 19th century up to the start of WWI, then later from the end of the Vietnam War to the day before 9/11, it depends on one’s perspective, doesn’t it, I'm a privileged white male, an African-American might fairly see that America never reached a zenith.

There are the mindless ones who will always wave the flag and trumpet their rights and who never realize that nations evolve and this one has too and is. Tragically, at some point it’s going to happen under national demagoguery, the rearing of such as we now are witnessing, that rights are suspended and elected authorities start arresting and interning people instead of keeping them under surveillance until it’s too late. By the time that happens it will be too late to check our national fall, and in fact that will be part and parcel of the fall itself, a manifestation that earth has awakened from the American dream that became a nightmare. In my mind, the fall began with Vietnam and other foreign interventions, as we lost sight of who we were and moved in an arrogance of self-righteous power. The world is tired of us and our imperial rise from 1942 on. We will in time and future history, if indeed we are at all, be a minor league team. Glad to have lived before that time, I’m sad to have lived into its beginning. Who, what age, what era, might I envy? Maybe my father-in-law’s time, when the War to End All Wars was armisticed and the big adventure was driving across America at age eighteen in a Model T Ford.