RSF&PTL

Sunday: windy, high storm tide as driving rain from tornadic clouds sped sweeping across the white capped Bay in front of 7H. 

And then within ten minutes, all clouds racing rapidly through to leave Sunday afternoon in glaring sunshine. Monday night return of lightning, thunder, driving rain, wind pushing even higher tide ashore straight down from my window seat.

Monday: hot lemon-honey water, coffee, chocolate, walk, dentist, muse.

Nothing ever posted on +Time has ever been an invitation for feedback or comment: this blog has never been a forum. Not to stifle, but never to invite. Just so this morning.

The grim, negative vicious bitter arrogance of the inaugural address astonished me, continues to burn. Afterward, WH press conference and later characterization of its outright lies on trivia as “alternative facts” stuns me: what shall we believe when the topics are larger than petty narcissistic obsession with who had the biggest crowd size? As to government lying, we already have a war based on nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that has murdered hundreds of thousands of human beings. We enter a new era wherein facts are openly conformed to officialdom, the stuff of dystopia where insanity is the ordinate: across the world there is another dear leader also with strange hairstyle also obsessed with himself, also unconstrained by truth, where at Christmas his subjects are ordered to celebrate his grandmother. My solace would be that every inauguration has its termination date except that before the decade is out, alternative truth will have corrected historic misunderstandings of the Constitution.  

In a government class at university sixty years ago, it would have been 1955, my UFla business and government professor declared that FDR, were he still alive, would still be president, in fact would be president for life as our liberties eroded. Franklin D Roosevelt, who had died in 1945 and was still fresh in all minds as one who’d tried to pack the Supreme Court in order to have his way, was in fact elected to four terms, serving 1933 to 1945, dying some weeks into his fourth. After his death, wisely or foolishly the Constitution was amended to limit presidents to two terms. A fair case can be made, and has been made regarding the Florida legislature, that term limits restrict the will of the people, who exercise term-limits ourselves by the ballot. To only a fool will not the thought have occurred, that constitutional amendments have been, and can be, overturned; by cumbersome due process of new amendment, or conceivably by court order, or in a “national emergency,” by executive order sustained by court order. This is no farther fetched than the evolvingly acceptable notion that facts have two shades, true facts and alternative facts. But then, regard for truth is a mark of civilized humanity. 

For the first time in my life I am afraid. Sad. Discouraged. About prospects for my country, my nation, our people. What are we becoming, have we become, are we yet to become? I’m of a mind to withdraw, keep my own counsel, mind my manners, forbid my fingers, shut my mouth. I cannot abide, for example, Christianity whose gospel of The Faith is not to love others in this life but to save oneself from hell in the next; to whom it is more important to have their political way by beginning instantly to dismantle the health assurance of poor Americans than to assure the adequacy of their health care as the first priority of change to improve a cumbersome system. As I say, write, I am inclined to keep my counsel, hold my peace. I can change nothing. I am certain of nothing but that the Church of Jesus Christ is a garden of love, not a salvation factory. And now a presidential inaugural speech embracing selfishness as the American Way. Me First. Time to sit back and let it happen as the torch of freedom is relit from the fires of hell. I don’t see being part of it peaceably. I visualize a noncompliant press, not acquiescing to alternative truth, being shuttered as government locks their doors for tax audit, etc. Once again I appreciate that the founding fathers gave everyday citizens the right to keep and bear arms: well organized Militia may indeed be necessary to reclaim a free State.

Whilst the blogging has been for my own mental exercise, my private contemplation is quietly to stop altogether before its stress claims me. As minimum I can stop linking on FaceBook. I don't need to write or voice these thoughts and fears. Indeed, I may write and post; or write, post and edit; or write, post and delete; or write and delete; or simply stare across Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico and wonder what the hell.

Right Shoe First & Praise the Lord.

Last night between rolling storms ->

Monday morning in damp, chilling wind ->

in Stoppage Time and holding
DThos+