Bush-Cheney was a recipe for disaster
that then festered
and then look what we got
BUSHMASTER assault rifles
definitely not for hunting, dear
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
Shaggy cattle at winter’s end
Ways American democracy is increasingly at risk
Spoiler alert. This is a rant. Here are some of the places I see us as American society being in deep doodah.
- Out-and-out lies, delusions, and false expectations “Making America great again” has done the exact opposite. And ideological preconceptions block any reality of what needs to be done. It’s a great sales pitch, but if you’re promising to fix something, you better master the details. Think about making your car or computer or anything else run better and who you’d trust doing the job.
- The center is coming apart, along with the breakdown of face-to-face community. Who belongs to a lodge or bowling league or even a church anymore? Without those, just how are our opinions tested and refined? It’s part of a decline of civic awareness and participation.
- Refusal to give and take, i.e. compromise, to work out solutions for the common good. Health care is a prime example. Any faults with “Obama-care” can be laid at the feet of those opposed to any health insurance for Americans who didn’t have union jobs or the like. And we know who’s opposed those unions.
- Disproportionate representation by rural states. Not just the Senate, either, but especially the Electoral College, which was a faulty way of accommodating Southern slaveholders to begin with.
- Disenfranchisement of voters, one way or another. Want to talk about “stealing elections”?
- PACs and other big-money corruption, leading to the undermining of the middle class. It’s why the rich are getting richer.
- An uninformed electorate, along with the economic collapse of responsible journalism coupled with the tainting of “liberal media” by certain self-interests. Where on earth have the left-wing editorial page columnists been in the past half-century, anyway?
- Blaming the victims rather than the super-rich. Talk about “entitlement”? Add to that the myth of the “self-made man.”
- The collapse of the tax system. I’m no fan of the Internal Revenue Service, but it’s been gutted to let those with the most to get away scot-free.
- Without excusing the left for its too-often sanctimonious airs, I’d say the real threats are coming from an increasingly barbarian right-wing. Or should that be “anarchists”? They’re not conservatives or patriots, OK?
Look, unlike many, I’ve read the Federalist Papers closely, the arguments behind the American Constitution. I can say definitively that MAGA is dead-set against its principles.
Your turn to weigh in. Just be polite.
Heavenly rest? The Pepsi sign always raises a chuckle
Kinisi 101
basket makers as a subset of weavers
all with more peaceful wisdom
or patience than I own
A definite sign of spring
Around here, you know spring has arrived when you see your first boat riding a trailer down the street. An uncovered boat, free of its shrink-wrap or tarp. Behind a battered pickup, of course.
And you can bet yourself that by the end of the day, you’ll have seen a second, if not more.
Who cares if there’s still ice on the lakes?
Deep Cove boatyard
Whazup
after several attempts to figure out how I’d list only what time and last-minute barreling impulses or friendships I wouldn’t want to lose these connections of phone calls and homespun meals in the absence of wild affection I’d lap up even distant lines as in conversation overheard ditto worship to lasso random thoughts and outline a start, so in the mailbox and an income besides to say nothing absolutely nothing about Jesus or just so many wildcards you keep some order re: the recording clerk, both our annual budget and a reminder the dues are due chock full of gossip I’d veer in adoration toward lunacy any day
Some things I thought I’d take up in retirement but didn’t
Looking back on my pre-retirement visions, I’m facing the fact that much of what I had anticipated has instead fallen by the wayside.
Here we go.
- Meditation: First thing in the morning, just like the ashram. Instead, I go pretty straight to the computer and start writing or revising. The clarity of those early hours is treasured for creativity, rather than the wee hours of my earlier years.
- Hatha yoga: Along with chanting, hymns, or even Bible study that I anticipated in the calm of early morning. Nope, none of these have even made into the afternoon or evening, either.
- Fasting, mauna observance, retreats: Again, this would have sprung from my ashram roots. Fasting had been a one-day-a-week routine – no food, rather a restricted diet. Mauna was a period of non-speaking, which could initially be very difficult before turning liberating and enhancing. The idea of getting away from it all for a week at a time definitely deserves renewed consideration.
- Tennis: I never have figured out the scoring, but there were a few friends who seemed willing to teach, if I ever had time, so, hey, why not? . Alas, fate intervened and they were no longer able once I was open.
- Bicycling: My original regular-exercise option, this was about to take off (pardon the pun) just about the time our younger daughter decided she wanted her long-neglected, high-quality wheels to join her in Greater Boston. Here, I had just paid to have it tuned up and ready, too, and even purchased a helmet and lock. Admittedly, all those gears – which we didn’t have back when I was a kid – were rather intimidating.
- Camping: I had purchased a tent and stored it in the loft of the barn, but when I finally pulled it down, it wouldn’t open – the weatherproofing had melted over the years.
- Hosting a monthly Poetry in the Meetinghouse series: There would have been a featured reader followed by an open reading.
- Travel: This fell away largely because of our budget but also because of the other things impinging on my time – the writing and revising, especially. Destinations would have included the annual Friends General Conference, writers’ conferences, Tanglewood concerts, as well as a return to the Pacific Northwest and then on to Alaska. There might also have been England, Ireland, Scotland, Alsace, and Switzerland, for genealogy. Italy, for opera and cuisine. Spain, Morocco, Japan, utter curiosity. Macedonia and Greece, retracing the trip my wife and elder daughter made a few years ago. More likely is visiting Quebec City, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia, all neighboring my current home.
- Boston weekends or midweek jaunts around New England: Again, mostly budget, even when it involved little more than an Amtrak senior-discount ticket. I could add visiting old friends around the country.
- A regular deep-reading routine: I am a booklover, after all, but am not checking off a book or two each week, much less one every day or two.
~*~
There are some other, more general, things I could add, such as taking up a social activist role after all those years of being stifled as a journalist, or specifics, such as getting serious about getting back to making and baking bread, as I did in the ashram, or forcing bulbs to bloom in the depth of winter.
And I likely won’t ever introduce my wife to the mountain laurels in full bloom along the Merrimack River at Newburyport, Massachusetts, or the springtime wonders of the Garden in the Woods in Framingham, west of Boston, now that we’re centering ourselves at the far eastern fringe of Maine.
One item especially amuses me – “second home (mountain lake or Maine island)?” The turns in our budget wound up ruling that out, but I am living on a Maine island now. You never know what might happen when you start sky-lining.
Selling Natives into slavery was not an isolated instance
One of the more disquieting things my examination of early Dover and New England stirred up for me is an awareness of a prevalent expression of white supremacy.
It starts out as fear, expressed in the emphasis on fortifications. The Plymouth settlers, for instance, spent much of their first year on building palisades rather than farming, which led to a nearly disastrous shortage of food through the winter. The defenses were apparently intended against Native raiders more than the Spanish, French, Dutch, or pirates.
Later, Puritans required palisades around their houses of worship as well, as happened at Dover’s second meetinghouse, and ordered that all men carry arms, which were lined up against the wall during public assemblies such as religious services.
~*~
THE PREMISE OF WHITE SUPREMACY COMES THROUGH CLEARLY embedded in descriptions of the Indigenous as savages or pagans and is intensified in the resolution of legal conflicts in an unjust system of jurisprudence. Natives always came out on the losing end, with no means of appeal.
Especially telling is the reaction to the killing of John Stone and seven of his crew in 1634 in retaliation for his kidnapping and murder of the Pequot sachem Tatobem. Even though Stone had previously been banned from Boston for drunkenness, adultery, and piracy, and news of his death brought outright joy to some residents in the city, officials demanded the Natives turn over the warriors responsible to face trial. The Pequot, however, refused, even after paying atonement.
Simmering tensions erupted in 1636 after the killing of trader John Oldham and several of his crew on a journey to Block Island, Rhode Island. Even though Oldham was a troublemaker banished from the Plymouth colony, his death caused sermons across Massachusetts and prompted military action that quickly escalated into war.
Telling of the implicit racism is Roger Williams’ line of congratulation to John Winthrop in 1637 for disposing of “another drove of Adam’s degenerate seed.”
~*~
BY 1638, MOST OF THE PEQUOT had been massacred or sold into slavery in Bermuda or the West Indies. An estimated 1,500 warriors had died in battle or been hunted down. And what followed was a landgrab by the colonists.
Military leader John Underhill, responsible for the massacre of Pequot women and children fleeing their burning village, then came to Dover, where he was briefly governor of the upper province, meaning Dover.
Bluntly? From the colonists’ perspective, a bad white man was worth more than a noble Native.
~*~
SLAVERY WAS PART OF NEW ENGLAND from the beginning.
When David Thomson settled at Pannaway in 1623, he had a Native as a slave, presented to him by an Indian leader. Yes, there was slaveholding among the Indigenous, too.
And whites could be enslaved as well, as was seen in threats to sell Quaker children in the late 1650s.
A key turn in the emergence of Merrymount in 1625 was the sale of some of the project’s indentured English male servants to Virginia and the impending sale of more to the tobacco estates, where death within a year was likely. Thomas Morton used the situation to rally the remainder to resist and stay put, leading to his libertine colony south of today’s Boston.
The origins of African slaves in New England are murky, but Pequots were exported so that they could not escape and return to their families or be freed in retaliatory raids. Instead, they were exchanged for Blacks, who could be held at less risk.
In 1637, during the Pequot War, the first American-built slave ship, the Desire, was constructed in Marblehead, Massachusetts, outfitted with leg irons and bars, and armed. She set sail to the British West Indies carrying Boston rum, dried fish, and captive Pequots, and returned seven months later with tobacco, cotton, salt, and enslaved Africans from the Caribbean plantations.
Thomson’s friend Samuel Maverick bought two Blacks as slaves in 1638. Another prominent slaveholder was John Winthrop.
In 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties document included a formal recognition of slaveholding.
~*~
UP TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, despite opposition, some Quakers held slaves, and Dover was not exempt. Up to ten were manumitted, likely with the equivalent of a year’s wages. There’s more on this in my book.
~*~
Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400th anniversary.
