Portland at dusk

If kind words were immune cells, I would be well enough to compete in the senior olympics. Your comments and get-well wishes have held me in warm-hearted embrace all day. Thank you for every word, heart, star, and thought. Sue just phoned, having read all your comments, and asked me to thank you, from her, for every word. She just posted her blip of my favorite sign from the climate march: “Now is the time to be BRAVE for everything we LOVE.” Amen to that. 

Unfortunately I find that I am not quite yet on the other side of this thing. I was all day coughing and blowing my nose, gripped by a lassitude that made crossing the room a chore. I remembered all the years of forcing myself to go to work despite whatever illness I might be having, and I basked in the privilege of spending the day at rest, hydrating, reading, and engaging in Facebook discussions about May Day. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has a theory of who or what is to blame. Capitalism. Liberalism. Corruption. Greed. The dominant narrative is that anarchists are to blame, with their Black Bloc tactics. What is Black Bloc? I misused the term in my post on May Day. An accurate description by a British-born sympathizer is here if you want it. If you are interested in this whole issue, for what it’s worth, my favorite article on the subject is this one by the Black Rose Anarchist Foundation.

I feel, on the whole, optimistic. Perhaps we aren’t doing enough. Perhaps we’re doing the wrong things. Perhaps we’re living in a fools’ paradise and failing to see the writing on the wall, the trees for the forest, the wheat from the chaff. But we are doing something, even if it’s wrong. I start to cackle and that makes me cough, and somehow, unaccountably, a great wave of affection and laughter comes over me. Human beings. How I do love us.