Back in the Old Great Depression young people moved back to their families.  They could not afford rent, so they went where the roof over their head was paid for.  They took care of their elders, scrounged for food and supplies, and did whatever they could do to keep the households afloat. 

A similar process is of returning home is happening now.  Many college age kids have returned to nests recently emptied.  Older children area also returning home, or staying home instead of setting out into the world.  They settle into a spare room, use the internet, eat the food.  Some exert themselves to take care of their parents or grandparents or siblings who are less able, and do the work that needs to be done around the house.  The richer and more entitled ones hunker down with gaming or other internet pursuits and refuse to even grocery shop.  The internet is the difference.  Back in the Old days our best avoidant distractions were books, now in the New it is the bottomless pit of sex and violence and disinformation that is the internet.  A mind-corrupting abundance of dopamine hits.  Back in the Old days the youth still had a work ethic that included the possibility of picking up a rake or a hoe or a hammer.  Now in the New days the youth think they should have gotten rich and famous somehow but they didn't, and now they don't know what to do.

Granted, the distancing requirements and loss of employment are especially hard on young people who are just getting their feet wet in the world.  But I have to put it out there that there are things worth learning and exploring at home.  Elders have things to teach.  Knowing how to build a wall, fix a pipe, or grow a vegetable garden, these are valuable skills.  Sure, you grew up in a time when your parents hired someone else to build and repair the house, and you got your groceries wrapped in plastic from a grocery, or already prepared from a restaurant.  But food grows from the earth, you too can grow it.  Animal food has to be butchered--are you ready to kill your meat?  This is your chance to learn some things that have been progressively more forgotten over the last 5 generations in America.  It's a good time to be able to subsist.

Back in the Old Great Depression, people got happier.  Several different studies noticed this change.  I have lots of theories about why this was true.  I suspect that being forced to work out differences with your families helps people grow up.  Instead of remaining a petulant child who has it your way but lives alone, you can learn to live with others and understand and respect their point of view.  I think that growing up takes us to a happier place.  I think that having honest, real, loving relationships with the people you know best is the strongest foundation of happiness.

During the Old Great Depression businesses closed but there was no pandemic.  In the New Great Depression we know that when the virus finds our ailing and elderly relatives, they will die.  This is a very hard thing.  I am mourning already for people that I talk to every day.  I know that someone dear to me will die, it is only a matter of time.  Back in the Old days people were dying at a normal rate.  Now we are dying by the thousands and we're nowhere near done with that yet.  The deep sadness is pervasive.

Just finished this book by Annette McGivney.  I ran across it because of a review in the Boatman's Quarterly, and got it from the local library.  It tells three parallel stories which all intersect: that of a young Japanese woman who was murdered, a young Havasupai man who killed her, and the author's story.  What brings the three stories together, aside from the murder, is a history of trauma.  Annette gives a rich and sympathetic review of the horrific history of indigenous tribes in the US and lands at the end on generational trauma which impacts the modern culture of all of our tribes.  She is respectful of Japanese culture and the drivers that brought the young woman into contact with the landscapes and people's of North America.  And she is honest in telling her own tale, superficially at first then deeper as her memories return of her own childhood abuse.  This is a worthwhile read for all those who enjoy broad cultural perspectives and those wishing to grasp the origins of violence in our culture today, and specifically that of the tribes.

 ​ "Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself," the Department of Justice declared in 1974. The DOJ spelled it out just four days before Nixon resigned, explaining that the president's pardoning power "does not extend to the president himself." 

Trump is the first antidemocratic president in modern U.S. history.  On too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself.  If transplanted to a country with fewer democratic safeguards, he would audition for dictator, because that is where his instincts lead.  This frightening fact has consequences.  The herd mentality is powerful in international affairs.  Leaders around the globe observe, learn from, and mimic one another.  They see where their peers are heading, what they can get away with, and how they can augment and perpetuate their power.  The walk in one another's footsteps, as Hitler did with Mussolini--and today the herd is moving in a Fascist direction.
--Madeleine Albright in Fascism: A Warning, page 246 (in what I think is the final chapter).

Following the Axis surrender, Korea's fate, like that of Central Europe, was still to be worked out.  Officially, the victorious Allies were committed to a free, united and independent Korea.  Then in the war's last week, Stalin's Red Army penetrated far into the country's northern half.  American diplomats, their inboxes overflowing, shifted their focus from what should be done to what could be achieved most easily.  In Washington, late one night, they met with their Soviet counterparts and, tracing lines on a map from National Geographic magazine, consented to the peninsula's "temporary" division along the 38th parallel.  The people who lived there were not consulted.

In 1948, with the Cold War well under way, the U.S.-supported Republic of Korea (ROK) and the USSR-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) officially declared their existence--the former in Seoul, the latter in Pyongyang.  North Korea's head of government, hand-selected by the Soviets, was Kim Il-sung, a thirty-three-year-old military officer who had spent the bulk of his life in exile and possessed little formal education.  He did, however, have big ideas.  Determined to reunify the Korean Peninsula on his terms, Kim persuaded the Soviets to underwrite an invasion of the South, boasting to Stalin that he would win easily.   He almost did prevail, but the United States surprised the DPRK by intervening, under a UN umbrella, prompting China to counter by also entering the fray.  In 1953, an amistice was signed to end the fighting, but with no victor, no formal peace, no significant change in borders, and a death toll that included more than a million and a half Koreans, 900,000 Chinese, and 54,000 Americans.

The war was a colossal waste of lives and treasure, so it matters that the DPRK has been built on a lie about who started it.  The worldview of any North Korean begins with the conviction that, in 1950, their country was attacked by sadistic murderers from America and the ROK.  If not for Kim Il-sung's brave leadership and the pluck of DPRK fighters, their homeland would have been laid waste and their ancestors enslaved.  Worse still, the story continues, Americans are evil and do not learn from their mistakes.  Given a chance, the savages will return and wreak more havoc.  Out of this sham narrative come the fear, the anger, and the yearning for revenge that Kim Il-sung harnessed to justify that world's most totalitarian regime.

--Madeleine Albright in Fascism: A Warning, pages 189-191, published in 2018.

We just received a couple of Christmas gifts from our friends in Lake Oswego.  One of them was a hand made ornament, a chicken sewn out of a red and white floral patterned cloth.  On Hawaii, chickens are everywhere, especially on Kawaii where there are no natural predators for the wild chickens.  The Hawaiians do not think of them as food.

A Brit named Cooke explored the Pacific islands three times and on his third lap he was killed by natives on a Hawaiian island.  I think that was in 1799.  He was trying to kidnap the king, who was clueless.  Empire builders like to start by kidnapping the king.  I just finished reading Sapiens by Harari and he speaks of the progress of empires around the world.  The Aztecs and then the Incas were enslaved by small bands of Europeans who landed and said "We come in peace.  Take us to your ruler."  They were taken to the rulers and promptly captured them, stole their wealth and enslaved their people.  If we are to take any lessons from this, it might be to immediately slaughter any godlike strangers that show up asking for our leaders.

Creationism gets treated by religious people as if it were a viable theoretical alternative to Evolution.  They do this in spite of the fact that evolution is broadly accepted by educated people world wide.  Evolution is obviously working on species today, and it is visible to any person with minimal powers of observation and exposure to the natural world.  Darwin was one such person.  Creationism is a myth, a dogma.  It is based on nothing other than a nice fictional book, and promoted by a whole lot of people who need a simple and colorul story to tell about how the world came to be.  Every culture, language and religion has its own creation story.  Creation stories can be spectacular and we love them.  But this does not make them theories in the scientific forum.  This does not make them true.  This just makes them good fiction.

Ninety nine million years ago a dinosaur got its tail stuck in the sap. Then, in 2016, someone noticed some interesting stuff in the amber at a Myanmar amber market. The pictures of dinosaur feathers are great--and they show a flowchart of feather evolution, and where these feathers fit in.  So cool.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/jaw-on-the-floor-entire-chunk-of-feathered-dinosaur-discovered-in-amber/

Just as Obama's presidency has deeply offended white supremacists and caused a resurgence of lively xenophobia in America, Clinton's impending presidency is bringing out the long-quiet depressed white guy who just hates women.  Why?  They wouldn't sleep with him, left him, weren't good to him when he needed it?  His mother did him wrong?  These sentiments that have come into public life are troubling and far too private really to be on T-shirts and election posters.  The loss of civility, and respect for reason, are devastating losses.  How can we come together as a nation when people talk this way to each other?  Are we headed back toward the civil war, when the south refused to accept Abraham Lincoln as their president and seceeded?

I am flying to Tennessee on the day after the election.  The town where my parents live--Oak Ridge--is not your average southern town.  It has a national laboratory in it, full of elitists with education Pile High and Deep.  Oak Ridge has so many scientists that the general world view of assimilating new information and coming up with new, reason-based theories, is part of the town culture.  Tennessee itself is not really fully southern, having been split by the Mason-Dixon line and with families on both sides of the civil war divide.  Still, I am curious to see what I will find the day after the election.

Bitch.  I have been called this.  Always by men.  Always by men who wanted me to do something other than what I chose to do.  Always by men who were unable to control or manipulate me.  They hated that I had a mind of my own.  They wanted me to bow down to their will.   I am not bitchy; I do not strike out for vengance.  I want only the same freedoms that men themselves expect, without having to be called names.  Without being told "calm down honey".  Clinton is in for as many years of verbal abuse as she is in office, plus some.  I thank her in advance for her strength and restraint in the face of the onslaught.  I am grateful that Obama has modeled for all of us the finest in human decency.  You dudes out there who say he is divisive: you are projecting.

I am not for "trigger warnings" and the extremes of political correctness that some youngsters seem to be demanding in college.  Buck up I say, and realize that some people take for granted what is exceptional to you, and vice versa.  Learn to self-soothe, to calm yourself in the face of alarming or disturbing realities or even art.  If you must protect yourself from certain things, do it yourself, do not expect the rest of us to tiptoe around you forevermore.  Friends are kept away like slugs when you are surrounded by eggshells.  Life is rich and lucious and sometimes the spice burns.  Eat it anyway.  Feel the feelings and realize that feelings are not you, they are something temporary that passes through you.  This too shall pass.  Racists: our first black president is about to step down and thousands of us will miss him terribly.  Sexists: our first female president is about to win.  Get used to it.  Whatever the reason for your bias, it is not acceptable.  We're moving on.

These interesting times are about to get even more interesting.