Seasonal reflection

Seasons are a bit of a shock to coastal Californians. We are not accustomed to wide temperature swings.

But here we are this frosty morning.in Massachusetts. And the land is its beautiful self. This is the ten-day deer shooting season, so it is not a time to wander woodland trails. There are hunters out there.

Empty woods roads have their own beauty and seem safe enough for walking. Pretty much the only traffic is pickup trucks bearing construction workers, building and maintaining the summer homes off these roads. It's prime season for that work. 

Here in Chilmark, we're warm and toasty, thanks to the climate-sparing heat pump we installed during the last visits. Over Thanksgiving weekend, energetic relatives replaced the sprawling woodpile with a snug and practical shed. We'll be grateful as we stoke the wood stove.

I settle in to ponder and delight in this season of apocalyptic anticipation, this Advent in which hope and fear jostle each other, this year and every year.

Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay.

Erudite Partner's postelection account of working in Nevada to elect Democrats channels the rage of so many women on the morning after ...

... all six of us were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE’s members and its two top officials, as was the director of the union’s campaign in Reno, along with the folks running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing, and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.

In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who’d promised to “protect” women — “whether the women like it or not.” He’d bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who’d overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending bodily autonomy for millions of women. He’d claimed that handing control of women’s bodies over to 50-odd state and territorial governments was what “everybody wanted.” I doubt it was the kind of “protection” Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas doctors refused her abortion care in the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days later. And it probably wasn’t what any of the other women wanted whose horror stories about suffering — and death — after the end of Roe were recently recounted in a New York magazine article, “Life after Roe.” No, we did not “like” the kind of protection that Donald Trump was offering us at all.

Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault hadn’t kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that his female opponent in 2024 was born “mentally disabled.… There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there’s something missing and you know what? Everybody knows it.” It’s hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the “something missing” was a penis. ... Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.

Several weeks on, I think we would do well to remember our rage, our burning awareness that women's humanity scarcely exists for so many, mostly men, that we live among and who delight in power over us. Read it all here.

Besides our rage, surviving the next iteration of American imperial and democratic decline will take smarts, building unlikely connections, determination, generosity and kindness. But let's not forget the rage ...