It's ugly. We carry on.

So we have done it. We have chosen disorder and disunity, criminality and cruelty, a cowardly attempt to turn back the clock in preference to choosing courage to search out a way forward. We, collectively, have revealed our shallowness and our foolishness.

Would that that this were a momentary detour. But I don't think it is. 

The riches of this land, both material and spatial, have given the motley collection of striving humans who live and jostle here a good 250 year run. (After we'd forcibly extirpated the previous inhabitants.) But we seem to have run out our string. 

The challenges of this moment in time are enormous: a climate that is becoming more and more hostile to life as we've known it, a world in which very different people and cultures are tossed up next to and often at odds with each other, exploding understandings of the malleability of genders, gender roles, and family structures. Not to mention, as in all eras, of plenty of aspiring crooks and petty tyrants who are only out for themselves and feel no responsibility to the collective "we." 

It's hard under the best of circumstances for large groups of humans to organize ourselves humanely. The mostly European-origin, mostly male-headed fraction of us has enjoyed something like the best of circumstances in this U S of A for a couple of centuries, but we're clearly coming back to the human norm while the natural balance around us collapses.

What to do? The answer is the same as always:

• Be kind to one another.

• Where people suffer, have their backs and lift up the weak..

• Don't get in their way when they lift themselves.

• Know that all people are both capable of horrors and infinitely valuable.

• Build the most humane institutions we can envision and create.

• Live without knowing when and where hope might break through -- and be bravely ready to notice when it happens. This last is harder than it should to be. That's who we are.

 I may need to give the blog a rest for a bit. Or not ...