A Treasure Hunt for Common Ground in Everyday Ramblings

This is a shot from the parking lot at the trailhead where we went hiking on Thursday. The looming Bonneville Dam complex is straight ahead down on the river on the other side of the road and there are a couple of fish hatcheries nearby that attract a fair share of eagles and ospreys.

I don’t know why that matters…context? There is evidence of the hand of man nearby but I often try to shoot as if there weren’t. Still, even with this development, it is stunningly beautiful out there. Now. It was logged out so this is all second growth.

This morning S and Frieda and me went walking and talked about the terrible news of this last week and it wasn’t until we got to the coffee shop we get tea at near the Farmer’s Market that I realized that S didn’t know about the sniper shootings in Dallas. She read it in the paper waiting for our iced tea.

I have been listening to the NPR Politics podcast and Code Switch and am touched by how profoundly disturbed these young talented reporters are, most of them people of color.

Personally I think it would be a good thing if we all allowed ourselves to show the grief, anxiety, fear, anger, (did I mention fear?) we are all feeling with this shocking, and yet not totally unexpected news in a country awash with guns.

And I am not really interested in what a bunch of old white men have to say about it all anymore. I am kind of done with that. I have been listening to them my whole life.

And look where that has gotten us.

We need, I don’t know, something like a reconciliation committee or something.

The writer George Saunders has a thoughtful long piece called Trump Days in the July 11th & 18th New Yorker that I appreciated and it still has me thinking…hard. He drove across country going to Trump rallies to see if he could understand the appeal.

At a polling place in Mesa Arizona during the primaries a trans woman joins him on a bench late in the day. People get afraid, she tells him, and nobody wants to be afraid. But if you get angry, you feel empowered. Trump is playing on people’s fears, to get them angry, which in turn makes us, on the other side feel fearful. It is a domino effect.

Last week I heard this rebroadcast of a radio documentary that was made about the Stonewall Uprising in 1989 when many of the folks who had participated were still alive.

Their narratives about what happened that day were consistent and moving about how up until that night the gay community lived in fear, fear of being outed and fear of the police that were on the take (all the gay bars were run by the mafia) and it was always yes sir, turning the lights on bright when there was a raid so nothing would seem furtive or suspicious and praying that this was not a night where they would be beaten or degraded or humiliated.

And then there was one transvestite who for whatever reason just decided enough was enough and as a cop was putting her in a patrol car she took off her shoe, her large high heeled shoe and started pounding him with it. She was handcuffed when she did it and it sparked a free for all of physical violence.

A lot of the participants and the onlookers said that this was a turning point for them. They were ready to see a change.

That was just a few years shy of 50 years ago. And although I know there are still problems and discrimination and… Same Sex Marriage is now the law of this land.

My hope, my dream, is that 47 years from now, a person in this country, no matter what they look like and no matter what they have done is treated with respect and is truly allowed due process.

I don’t know how we can get from here to there with all these guns.

But I do know the first step is to talk to each other and see if there is anyway, any way at all we can find common ground.

Last updated July 09, 2016