Smoke

Photos don’t really do it justice. Reminds me of the atmosphere in Blade Runners 2.

My daughter didn't go outside in school today and came out wearing a mask. I was going to get her, and my neighbor gave me a mask.  That brings back memories of the pandemic. Everyone went home, we didn't go to the park, as usual.

The orange flowers are kind of more orange with the orange sky.

Forest fires are natural. When you curb them, they just collect more fuel to burn later, make it harder to control. Eventually you can't control it, and you get what they seem to get almost every year out west. It's an unstoppable force of nature. Nature is beautiful and wonderful, but it's also deadly and you can't control it.

You can't start any fires in NYC parks, but the was a fire that burned a swath of reeds in Flushing Meadows, about the size of a basketball court, but it didn't spread any further. A year later it was like it didn't happen.

Sometimes when I was out west, on some trip with my parents, driving endlessly. We would come across a recent area that had caught fire. Almost everything was dead, it was just burnt wood.

A male to female drag queen sang the national anthem at the soccer game. When someone new says how disgusted they are and how wrong those people are, I block them like a forest fire, they are spreading their terrible hate and lack of empathy. I don't really have time to argue or counter their comments, I just block them, hoping to staunch the wildfires of hate out of control in America. Unlike fires in nature, these fires don't seem natural, they are based on the withdrawal of care for other human beings, like you can stop a drag queen from existing by hating them. What do they threaten to the unintrospective? They stir up something very threatening to them. Ideas of gender are violated. The underneath biological sex is overlayed with the wrong pattern of gender for them, and that makes them rage.

When I was a teenager, it was cool to go to the Saturday midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I love that movie, and thought it was edgy. I didn't realize 4 decades later there would be a culture war to distract us from the once again rich getting the upper hand to buy off politicians to cut their taxes. The rich like culture war as cover for their class war. They themselves don't really care about the culture wars. They have enough money to buy justice for themselves, and impose their justice on others. The America I thought I was growing up in as a kid doesn't exist, or was taken from me. Forensic scientist can say which. We have eliminated the unprecedented boom of the 80's and 90's and stopped spreading the wealth. We've entered a robber baron era again, we've studied this in school, how is it happening again. The rise of anti-semitism, it's more and more common and acceptable. Now right wing minorities join in with punching down at others, they don't understand how fragile it is.

There was an African woman who loved Trump. We got along until she started insisting on her politics and then I couldn't abide her. January 6th was a legitimate protest to her. She moved to Hungary, where they have Christian Nationalism, where they don't like non-whites in their far right wing ideology. Part of the right wing agenda is to give space to white supremacists. I wonder how her mixed children and how she is doing from Hungary. She liked the right wing. Will they allow her even to exist because she shares so much of the ideology, or is she oppressed because of her skin color in the right wing country? I don't know, it's unlikely she'll come back exactly to this neighborhood if she comes back to America. She could go anywhere, why come back exactly here and let everyone know how wrong she was to back far right wing ideology. We join causes that could consume us, if they got out of control. The right thinks they're attacking unlimited empathy, but it's only idiot empathy that would allow those wildfires to spread.

Ivanka Trump has changed her name to Ivanka Kushner, identifying with antisemitic tropes her father says, because her brand was not doing well. She was willing to join in and connect with the power her father had, but now that everything is going sour, he's being held accountable--he thought he could escape accountability. The Supreme Court which he stacked with right wing radical judges, adding to the bought and sold ones already on the court, will protect him, but there are too many judges, and not everything goes to the Supreme Court. Appealing costs money. He tries to attack the judges families, get the names of the jurors. He does exactly everything you're not supposed to do. But the courts are a place where people like me, who grew up like me, remember the picture of America that was presented to us when we were young, and are fighting for it. 

When will this fog lift? 

Thoreau was vehemently against slavery, and did what he could to support the fight against it. He would die before the Civil War was over.