Hi Stuart: Great to hear from you. Not much has changed since you were here: room a little messier, Ken’s knee giving him pain after a spring and summer of using it hard, I’ve finished a few more books and spinning and knitting projects, and we have 2 more boats with the acquisition of a sailing dingy and Jack’s Tollycraft–oh, and Lea is in nursing school at Drexel in Philidelphia where she moved in August with her boyfriend, Wesley, and his dog, Rocky, and Ely is in a masters of public administration program at PSU. I’d almost forgotten that last bit with both kids in school again challenging Obama’s financial aid changes.
I can’t write rationally about the elections coming up here on Tuesday and the forecasts which are heartbreakingly dismal. The media is sucking them for every last bit of entertainment pathos it can wring from its audience; and I only watch PBS, if I can bear to watch at all. I haven’t watched much reality tv but near as I can tell producers have taken up the emotional gambit of “Fear Factor” and smeared it across the electorate. So, I’ve tuned it out. Haven’t confidence in any polls–since Arthor Anderson went down in Enron’s debacle, and Wall Street has been shown up naked, and Greenspan got his economic “genius” from reading Ayn Rand books it is more than plain that if you trust any data, fact, feeling about anything it better be because you can check it out yourself against other known information and experience. But, that has been the way for me since 6th grade when I realized my parents were way out over their skis. A lot of people look toward government as the last bastion of parenthood, something they can rely on to take care of them, personally, but that is not what government is, can be, or should be. We have to rely on ourselves and then each other which makes community which then, makes government and then hopefully makes government work most of the time for most of us and then, cause of the Bill of Rights, protects those who get left out for one reason or another from being trounced by government.
Part of the extra angst of this mid term is related to the death and dying of security in religion wherein people still felt safe even if government had gone wonky on them. With the catholic church justifiably falling into flames around us and in Europe which is significant cause American Catholics have always had tension over birth control and abortion (Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as nons in US–from stats and personal experience with friends) but showing the priesthood up as a bunch of out of control pediphials with no hope of remedy is devastating. Most people know in their guts, if not yet their brains, that the bible, the koran, and the torah, are tools of ancient peoples to control themselves and no more the words of god than this email. But for people who had used these tools to anchor themselves to reality it is having a very important rug pulled out from under them. Obama came on the scene not unlike a savior though he vorciferiously claimed not to be but I remember seeing those rallies and he is paying the price for disillusionment. Ken is disillusioned, but he has been for 50 years so he doesn’t count. I’m not, but I and my family, which I’ve worked very hard to place–have spent every bit of energy, knowledge, resource in my adult life, like every other female animal with children–to position my progeny for survivial and luck being with us to adapt and procreate while being and doing “good.” We, as you know, are very buffered here in NE Portland.
I’ve been reading several series of novels by the same author, Anne Perry; pure escape fiction but historical and analytic of human nature and circumstance as any novel worth its name should be. The first set is during and after the Crimean War with a Nightinggale nurse as protagonist. The 2nd set is during the 1880s in London with a Police detective and his wife–when the city police was only a generation old and still at risk of disbandonment and political censure, before their police force it was the medival sherriff who handled things and reminds me of these building modern institutions in Afganistan and the Balkans and Africa now and how fragile even our police are here in Portland–from inside and outside. All these institutions are only as strong as a people’s willingness to put faith in them; at times our faith is severely shaken, like in Mexico right now being terrorized by drug cartels–what’s a government to do? The 3rd series is WW1 and it deals with the tension of millions dying for belief in the English form of self government as opposed to the Kaisar, Tsar, Holy Roman Emporer, Ayatollah, Saddam Hussein form of capriciousness and essentially enslavement but “peace.”
And, I think that is the underlying message of this election: Obama and the democrats need and expect and demand a belief in self government, responsibility, accountability for thinking for one self and one’s community and building toward opportunity, health, education for all, of course it is a muddle through but only Mussolini could make Italy’s trains run on time and think of the trade off. The republicans and their tea party expression which they are responsible for, else why Sarah Palin on McCain’s ticket, have polarized themselves into the other with their demigoguery and ideological intransigence, the reign of terror wherein a few get power and riches at the expense of degradation for the many. That is it in a nut shell, but that is what got Hitler elected and we fool ourselves if we think that can’t happen here or anywhere, anytime. When we elect incompetent, ignorance who exploit fear instead of building strong even if they are only the puppets of others, like George Bush the Pathetic, we risk everything but most espescially ourselves. The supreme’s decisions to take that election out of the the realm of the constitution will go down in history as the greatest sabotage of our country, if we survive it.
I have a whole other exploration of nested metaphors from a paper I read recently about stressed and truamatized individuals being better adjusted than their peers–if not too stressed or truamatized. I wonder about that idea being moved up several notches to nations, could look at city and state levels too . Since the supremes have equated individuals and corporations, might want to look at the psychology of nations. Anyway, suspect the US would be healthier if we had some real wars with death, destruction, heroism and bravery and a chance to stretch ourselves out of this staring at our belly button phase right here at home… It is taboo to talk of the good of war and not ready to go there, but will one day.
Miss you, so keep in touch more often and don’t worry about our silly phone plan; we can talk for any hour for $3 now, cheaper than dinner together but not as fun as seeing you in the flesh. Look forward to more Ottawa stories. Lea and Wesley planning on Thanksgiving in Montreal. It is all so far away…
Love, Susan
It was 4 feet short of the ’96 flood but no less impressive for that. Brown–burnt umber with a lot of white in it or coffee with a lot of milk and a few grounds, not rich like cocoa–water crept up, inch by inch eating the grass–all day Sunday. The peak at Virginia’s hit about midnight well after a pitch dark obscured our marker gauges. I tried to photograph the scene with my camera at 2330; all I recorded was black.
Ely and Marcus came out about 1:00 in the afternoon with his dogs: Cooper and Copa. I let Stout out of the van and the dogs ran and ran and ran like they’d never run before and might never get the chance again. All the time the river kept rising. Marcus and his dad wore their matching carhart overalls and Ken had on his carhart pants. When they arrived, Ken and Peter had just finished a morning’s work and gone to their respective chairs to rest. Marcus walks into the living room and asks what’s up and somebody says, nothing. Marcus gets that panicky 9-year old boy look and says–”I came here to work and I want to work.” That startled us into motion again but it wasn’t until an hour or so later that Ken took him out back and had him clean the gutters. 
Ken cleared out the trench that he and Bunky and a work party crew dug behind the house to drain water away from the foundation after water compromised it in ’96. Seems Clyde’s rock foundation there is the weak link in our flood protection plan. 
