Can Care

  

Confirmed deaths, not controversy 

  While rumors abound and the media persists in being a mix of personal commentary with some fact, there is also the truth on the ground.  

  Like a war taking on all the weight of attending issues, our Country just spent four years gathering the steam of barely keeping heads above water.  I am not pessimistic though because of us.  Us workers, for example, have upheld routine and baseline economic sanity the whole way through plague and an impossibility of demands on our own lives.  It's taken an enormous amount of strength and determination!  And at the heart of that power has been caring.

  Even as places were beseiged by homelessness and drugs and not enough work for all of us, forced stagnant because of the money situations, and overwashed with seeming don't have to care...government's gonna take care of everything...everyone can just do what they want...it's been us citizens battling to keep things safe--owned and cared for.

  The disasterous weather of late summer has been a bone wearying blow to our overall spirit and security, yet we've managed to calm our political clamor enough to generally express a love of nation and what makes us one of the most God Blessed group of people in the world.  We may not have more than a few bananas left to eat but we've got a lot of compassion for humanity and passion for living in a country where so much is possible.

  We are still working through the finer points of price gouging, proper compensation for acts of God versus a dangerously empty federal funding honeypot, and people using products and services to make political jabs and stabs.  There's always gray area in transition and though no one has officially deemed us in a "war economy" yet, it's like we've been par boiled.

  There's also always been gray area in reporting "truth" as nations realign around the centers of black and white.  It's never okay (or legal) to report in journalism untruths, but in a state close to but not quite totally censored because of real war there is much that is not said or stated for the record.  A lot of the quasi-legal, second-hand-to-fact "talk" that goes around may not seem dangerous but it's basically like winging it on safety issues in the height of a storm...normally people wouldn't be standing around outside but there's an earthquake, foundation like that won't hold, roof shook off...our president just sort of got worn out....

  In our area there'd been a lingering gray area zone since the pandemic was like an earthquake.  What's changing us into more orderly is not strange quips from candidates, it's us getting our shit together!  From the dirt up people have really been motivated to prove survival and are in campaign mode--caring about the Republic despite exhaustion, change of season coughs and colds, and a real uncertainty about some of the stuff going on in the world.

  Uncertainty fuels strange quips.  Our overall context is a diversity of people functioning as Americans, so when there's not a strong Republic of Individuals, it's our context that gets jumbled.  There are a lot of reasons that got us less than strong America, but what's more important is moving forward as capable and not as an uncertain thing.

  We have been here before as a nation--part of "the West" and fires on flanks.  Everyone's role is actually more simplified in supporting each other and sticking together in a mostly defensive position.  Nothing about being American is uncertain.  And just like the economy sometimes gets blanched to the point of war economy--all sinks or swims--the objectives have to be on a priority list.  In that sense our controversial issues are not very different from the days when Abraham Lincoln looked out over people in a mosh of philosophical views who were physically destroying everything.  He himself had to keep pushing himself to hold the vision of America as an ideal always being made into an America of the day.

  There are times in our lives where we must serve the purpose of the greater good.  And this is at the heart of why people sacrifice their own "lives" for their children's future and the perpetuation of Republic.  It's being patriotic and that comes before quandry and emotions regarding a nondescript humanity.  Because the way through, the way to life besides battlefield is to defend nation that is not battlefield.