On Occupied Capitol Hill

I took the trash bins to the curb and stared at the buzzing sky. The winter clouds are hiding the fact that the days are noticeably lighter now, but they aren't hiding the helicopters. The last time this happened I was in shorts and flip flops, but that time, the threat was the helicopters and the police and petty criminal opportunists. This time, six and a half months later, the threat is from homegrown terrorists, and we have to rely on those choppers and coppers to protect us.

I love living on Capitol Hill. I love telling people I live on Capitol Hill. I hate when "Capitol Hill" is used by the national media and Americans from other parts of the country as a substitute for talking about Congress and the politicians they send here. Now, I have only lived on the Hill for six of my eighteen years in DC, but I don't think I will ever live in another part of DC again. I like going to restaurants and spotting congressional representatives. I love walking past senators on the street and giving dirty looks to the ones I don't like. I live for chatting with journos in bars and staffers in cafes and DNC folks in hardware stores. I even loved the one time I got schooled in a bar by a Republican congressman who actually voted FOR the Affordable Care Act, whom I mistakenly criticized for voting against it.

But those are not common occurrences in quotidian life. What's normal is taking the trash bins to the curb on Sunday nights, going grocery shopping at the Harris Teeter, and saying hello to the neighbors walking their dogs while doing yard work. I love living on Capitol Hill because it is a neighborhood filled with good people, a sense of community, and worldly experience. You wouldn't know normal people live on the Hill by reading national media, however, as they generally ignore the people who live here for the fake glamour of politics. The reality is that Capitol Hill is like a small town, where you run into people you know at Frager's Hardware or Tunnicliff's Tavern or Mangialardo's or the post office, dry cleaners, or city park.

Now our lives are in an upheaval, with a cacophony of surveillance and patrol helicopters roaring overhead, the streets to get most anywhere off the Hill closed, and armed troops filling the pizza joints and burrito shops.

The weak-minded lowlifes of this country mired in the pit of their own mediocrity have turned our nation's capital into a conflict zone.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I have spent much of my adult life obsessed with conflict. From the moment in Luxembourg when the school took us to both the American and German WWII cemeteries to Dr. Haag's classes on the Third Reich and Cold War to the trips to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt to working at the peace and reconciliation center in Ireland and working in human rights and democratic governance in the Middle East to living and working in Beirut, I've been on the periphery of it all. Yet I've never been in it. The first time I went to Belfast was the day the Easter peace treaty was signed, and fortunately, nothing happened. I saw Egyptian soldiers patrolling the streets of Cairo the first time I went to the Middle East, but nothing happened there, either.

In Beirut, there is always the threat of conflict, but while I was there, nothing really happened. There were times of increased tension when the threat of conflict was real, but people went about their daily lives because they had to. I wrote this bit about the threat of renewed conflict nearly ten years ago from today:

A taxi sat parked on the side of a normally busy street in Beirut, one of the common beaten up old Mercedes that have somehow survived as everything in Lebanon has somehow survived. The driver, whose face was as worn out as his car, slumped behind the wheel as he filled the vehicle with cigarette smoke. In the backseat were two women passengers whose worried expressions told more tales than an entire library could ever teach you. The three of them were listening to the Prime Minister's speech on the radio. Further down in desolation, another driver sat with his car door open on a darkened corner, listening intently with a hardened face, a facade, for you could sense the truth of what he felt emanating from deep within him. Shopkeepers had televisions or radios tuned in, and you knew the blue lights glowing from the windows of houses had Hariri's oddly bearded face on TV screens.

The tone of the speech was uncharacteristically defiant as the normally weak leader challenged the militia that now threatens the (relative) stability his country. The pulse of the city itself was uncharacteristically slow. This was not the Beirut that has been featured in the travel sections of Western newspapers so many times over the last two years. No, this was the Beirut of history books.

You really have to be here to understand how it feels - the air, the atmosphere, I don't know how to describe it - but it is like there are supernatural forces at work. The feeling is something deep, like the whole universe, all of existence, all of time and space and history is inside you, and you can look inside the souls of people and see their fear in all its nakedness.

During daylight hours, one doesn't notice there is something dangerously wrong here, for the fruit vendors push their carts and the taxi drivers stand on the corners and the shawarma cooks sell their mouthwatering meat. The coffee shops are filled with studying students and elderly elders and housewives both covered and not, and people buy shoes and clothes and belts and other things they don't really need just as they always would. Incessant car horns, diesel-spewing generators, and construction workers shouting from great heights to the ground below still perform the dissonant symphony known as Beirut.

But with dusk come the demons and the ghouls who have haunted this land for many millennia. The streets have been emptier, never more noticeably than last night as Hariri spoke to put Hezbollah in a position where they'd have to take responsibility for any violence that may occur. And they are responsible. No one else is threatening violence. Everyone else is sick of it, sick, sick, sick. Everyone else wants to live normal lives. Everyone else wants a job, electricity, decent internet, and good schools for their kids. It isn't fair. It isn't fair to the innocent Lebanese who have suffered time and time again for the stupidity of a few.

 

And that's kind of what it feels like to live on Capitol Hill at this moment in time, except we don't have the wisdom of experience or the weathered fear; we have a worry cloaked in naivety and a little of that American arrogance that tells us it can't happen here, really, that last week was just an abberation. We try to reason with ourselves that the threat is exaggerated, but with every bit of news that drips out about what happened last week, our brains tell us that the threat is more serious than we know. We remember all the other times, the bombing in Nashville, Charlottesville, the Rittenhouse murders, cops killing Black Americans, the Pittsburgh synagogue, kids in cages, family separations, Muslim bans, the journalist killings, the explosion of hate crimes, and we know this is already a war they are waging.

I used to describe to people that living in Beirut was like "living IN the news" because of everything that happened in and around it. Well, I am definitely living IN the news again. I see their Jesus signs at their hate rallies and think of Hezbollah, the "party of God." I see their Trump flags and think of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, whose fat face plasters walls across Lebanon. I see their guns and think of the green rifle on Hezbollah's yellow flag, appropriately colored for their cowardice. I see their homogeneity and I think of the tribalism that defines much of the world in conflict.

So we go about our daily lives on Capitol Hill and the rest of DC hoping that the minor security inconvenience is not for naught, hoping that we can nip this Trump-inspired nazi movement in the bud before it flourishes into a permanent part of the American cultural landscape. We're all losing sleep, though some won't admit it. We tell each other to be safe this week when we're purchasing wares in the local shops or passing by on the sidewalk. We've hung lights and signs in our yards professing our joy that the end of a nightmare could be coming to a close. 

But there is a darkness we just can't shake.

Food 101

 I'll never forget the first time I saw a raw egg on a pizza. 

That wasn't even the most horrifying thing on it. No, my seafood pizza, "fruits de mer," had tentacles and prawns with eyes. I am not sure why I even ordered a seafood pizza, as we had nothing like that back in Ohio, USA, and Ohio does have good pizza. But I was in a small town in Luxembourg, which to a twenty year old Ohioan was exotic, and I wanted to try new things.

The pizza place was called San Marino. My housemates and I went there with our host family in the beginning of our junior year in Luxembourg, the first of many times we would eat a San Marino pizza. Us Miami students must have quadrupled their business that year, the first year the school was located in the town of Differdange. We ate so much pizza from there they created a carryout service just for us. 

Pizza was a good starting point for food exploration. In the Midwest, food was, er, rather unadventurous. An average Midwestern cupboard contained salt, black pepper, cinnamon, something generic called "Italian seasoning," maybe a lemon pepper mix, and a handful of stale spices used once in a new recipe that had most likely not been cooked again. Midwesterners put crumbled potato chips on top of casseroles made with cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, and cheese again, often with canned cream of mushroom soup, and called it cooking. The internet has improved Midwestern fare a great deal, but do a Pinterest search for "casserole" and you will see that they are still massacring tastebuds in droves. My mother did better than most. We always had vegetables and I am grateful for that. She also had spices.

Europe was my first exposure to a different kind of food, however. Suburban southwest Ohio in the eighties had Chinese, Mexican, and Italian, but these were blanded up for the American palate. I was exposed to real Italian food early on in that year in Europe - in actual Italy - and a particular meal in Cinque Terre where I tasted pesto for the first time (in September during real pesto season in the area where pesto was invented) showed me all that food could be. To this day it is still one of the best meals I have ever eaten.

I learned that fresh food is the way food is meant to be eaten. I learned that produce shouldn't be as expensive as it is in the US. I learned that frozen meat is a crime against nature. And I learned to respect cheese as a divine gift and not something to smother casseroles with. 

It would be some years before I would cook on my own. I learned about Arab food while studying Arabic in Monterey, CA, but I only ate it, never cooked it. A friend of mine I met there and with whom I lived when I moved to DC taught me about Indian spices. I had never heard of such wonders as cardamom, turmeric, garam masala, corriander, and fenugreek. Still I did not cook.

Then I moved to a house with him and started a garden. It was a small Italian herb garden with a couple of tomato plants, though I struggle to remember exactly what I grew. I know basil and oregano were involved. That's when I started to cook. I had to learn the basics. I had never cooked fresh broccoli. I didn't know how long chicken should cook. I didn't know what a dry rub was. I couldn't identify ginger in a grocery store. Stir fries and soups were easy enough. I made my first Thanksgiving dinner there, and the turkey turned out perfectly. I made my first homemade tomato sauce, too. I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed to be working. I discovered I had a knack for flavors.

Then came a series of life upheavals - a mouse problem in the house after the pipes froze and exploded, depression, being passed over for a promotion, going to Eastern Europe for three months, unemployment, the Obama campaign, more unemployment. Then I got a job with a Lebanese organization, which changed everything. Living in Beirut exposed me to the best food on the planet and a people who appreciate it. Here is where I would learn that food is a lifestyle, an art, a spiritual conquest.

I grew tomatoes, peppers, and herbs at my next place. I began to collect spices. My life was still in upheaval, as in only three years I went through three jobs, a lot of it due to the Bush recession and budget cuts. The house became a nightmare of pestilence of all kinds, including bedbugs, mice, and a slumlord who stole my tomatoes and peppers. But after all that, a miracle. A recruiter called me out of the blue, and six years later, I am still with the company and am living in a place with enough space for a decent sized garden, where I grow a dozen herbs, tomatoes, peppers, all kinds of greens, potatoes, strawberries, carrots, melons, cucumbers, and whatever else I can fit into the plot. Gardening is the bulk of my free time. I am motivated to provide something nice for my neighbors to look at while also cooking food that I grow myself. The fulfillment you get when eating something you have grown is fantastic.

I have a whole kitchen wall of spices these days and create my own recipes, but I am still learning to cook. Once you stop learning, you probably start making casseroles filled with dairy fats and cans of creamed salt. I'm still trying to get timing down. I still can't poach an egg. My obsession is flavors and the weirder it sounds, the more it is a challenge I want to tackle. I make excellent chili but recently I thought, what if chili, except with shrimp, and what if you cook the chili with the juice of a whole lime, and it was delicious. I put cayenne in fruity drinks and sauces because the universe made them go together. I grind my own spice mixtures in my "kitchen lab" and name them political things like "Rosemary's Babygate" and "Ruth Bader Ginger" because I live and grow things on Capitol Hill. I buy most produce from the local farmers market and use the local butcher and fishmonger when I can. I never follow the recipe if I am using one and I try new and weird things as a rule. 

Still, I would never put a raw egg on pizza.

Goals

I made a list.

Usually I think lists at the new year are pointless. We all say this is the year I will do this or that and none of us ever really does it. We lose steam around the end of January and by spring we have forgotten what we were committed to do.

This year is truly different, though, because of the nature of our 2020. We've had ten months to reflect upon our lives without the usual distractions, and we're going to have another four or five months to continue that reflection under the same circumstances, and that is best case scenario. Many Americans have realized that the things they thought were so important - like sports - really aren't, that maybe civic engagement matters. I want to believe they've realized that, anyway. I'll refrain from haranguing the MAGA crowd right now; it seems they have not only learned nothing, but they've actively fought against learning anything at all.

This year, having nowhere to go forced me to confront my neglect of the many interests I have. Until countries closed their borders to Americans, my life revolved around the one or two trips abroad I got to take each of the last six or seven years. When I wasn't planning the trips or experiencing the trips or looking at my photographs from the trips, I was dreaming of the trips. Perhaps the most productive thing I have done in my personal time is my garden, which is a kind of tiny park my neighbors love. I am motivated by them as much as I am by the plants themselves. The rest of my time I spent watching baseball or hockey and drinking beer in bars and wasting time on social media.

One day you wake up and you realize that half your life is over and you wonder what have you actually done with it because it feels like you have all of these snapshots tucked away in a photo album collecting dust on a shelf. I have always loved living in Washington, DC and I love living on Capitol Hill and I make a good salary at a good company, but I feel unfulfilled. I think of all the pursuits I've had that I have failed to follow through on and wonder why I never let them get anywhere. The books I've wanted to write, the businesses I've wanted to start, the post-graduate degrees I've wanted to pursue...they never get done. Part of the reason is that I get distracted too easily and I jump from one thing to another without ever finishing anything. I don't know if I've always been like that or if this is an age of mobile phone development. I have the attention span of a gnat these days. Even the 500 words of this blog post at this point have taken me an hour to write, because I stare out the window, my thoughts drifting from work to the stack of unfinished books on the table to thinking about my cookbook to worrying about my plants. 

So I made a list. 

Will I stick to it?

 

Interesting Times

The terrorists are planning an attack on my city in the coming days. DC is in a state of emergency until the 21st. Disturbing reports that multiple MPD officers were part of the mob make me worried MPD won't do their jobs. (I mean moreso than usual.) Not to mention the Capitol Police, who let the mob in and took selfies with them. 

Social media corporations, which bear so much responsibility for the rise in extremism, are banning these nazis, including Mango Mussolini himself, and Parler was taken out of the Play and Apple stores so it is harder for the terrorists to organize.

I think I live far enough away from the Capitol to not be personally at risk, but it is just down the street, and the National Guard is nearby. There was a shootout car chase on the day of the insurrection a couple of blocks from me that MPD won't talk about, and there was a suspicious package found about an hour ago in the area.

This threat is not a joke.

I wish I could say I trusted security forces in the city, but too many cops side with nazis these days, and duty to country seems to have disappeared for this invisible threat they think Democrats are. Future historians who study propaganda will look back at this period as a time of mass hysteria. All I can think about is the phenomenon in the Middle Ages known as Dancing Mania where large groups of people would start dancing and wouldn't stop until they collapsed of exhaustion or died. Yes, died. (Historians still don't know exactly why this happened.)

Now large groups of mediocre people with mediocre lives are gathering in mobs and militias for some made up threat because they've been bombarded with propaganda from the wealthy and powerful, who want to use them as foot soldiers for more power. They can't grasp they're getting played. Anyone who voted for Trump who isn't in the top 25% of the wealthiest Americans is getting played. If you got a stimulus check and you voted for Trump, you've been played. 

Propaganda is one hell of a drug.

The next 11 days in DC will be highly stressful. At least many of us will be stuck at home. 

How to Soup, Part 2: Turkey Noodle with Ginger and Apples

This soup had to be made because that's what you do when you have a Thanksgiving turkey carcass. Turkey or chicken noodle soup is pretty straightforward; I don't stray too much from your standard versions. One variation I love is roasted garlic chicken noodle, where you simply roast a head of garlic, mash the cloves into a paste, and mix it into the soup.

My stuff always has a bite. Occassionally I will make it really spicy, but for this turkey noodle soup, the cayenne and red pepper flakes are perfectly adequate.

I had made so much broth that lifting the pan to pour it through a cheesecloth was too difficult, so I just used a slotted spoon to skim the fat and the old rosemary leaves and tongs to pull out the bones and branches. I ended up simmering the broth for two hours before starting on the soup.

Here are the ingredients, minus the turkey meat.

I had an apple that was going bad and some mushrooms that needed to be used, so into the pot they went. Half an onion, a lot of ginger, another two carrots, about a cup of frozen green peas, a box of rotini, fresh chopped rosemary, garlic powder, cayenne, chili flakes, and salt are the remaining ingredients.

I put the veggies, noodles, and spices in first (minus the rosemary) and let them simmer for an hour. Then I put the turkey meat in and the rosemary, let it cook for 20 minutes, and had my first bowl of it.

It's yum.

How to Soup, Part 1: Broth

I always make soup after Thanksgiving using the turkey carcass. I have a giant soup pot and always make a lot of it, packing my freezer for the winter. I'm hoping to find a few people who are down on their luck to share it with this winter. It's been a tough year for everyone.

This is how I make my broth. Nothing really unique about it except maybe my use of turmeric, which gives it a buttery, earthy flavor.

Step 1: Fill pot halfway with water, add a branch of fresh rosemary and a handfull of fresh thyme sprigs from the garden, turn burner on low.

 Step 2: Chop up some carrots, celery, and half an onion (I use the other half after the broth is finished.) I ate or pickled all the carrots I grew this year, so these are from the farmer's market at Eastern Market, as is the onion. The lovely lemon knife is from Hill's Kitchen.

 Step 3: Add bay leaves from your beautiful bay laurel tree that you keep in your kitchen window for the winter. I suppose store bought leaves will have to do if you don't have a beautiful bay laurel tree in your kitchen.

Step 4: Add dried chiles you grew this summer in your garden.

Step 5: Remove the turkey meat from the carcass and throw the whole carcass in the pot. Put the meat in the fridge to add near the end of the cooking process.

 

  

Step 6: Add enough turmeric to cover the surface of your broth. (This turmeric is from Souk Market on Barracks Row. I refilled an old container.)

 

 

Step 7: Stir, cover, and relax for an hour.

I am writing a cookbook with recipes from ingredients purchased from vendors around Eastern Market, so this and the coming blog posts are practice for that. I haven't entirely decided on the format yet, but I've been writing down my recipes for years.

I am not really sure how to say any of this.

The sky is buzzing, as it has been for the last four days or so. The sirens ring out as they have for the last two months, but for a different reason this week. The helicopters and the drones are like shooting stars from Hell. We are under attack.

I am starting to think covid was a blessing, IF it makes Americans pay attention.

Are you paying attention?

I live in Chocolate City. I have for 17 years now after living in high fructose corn syrup vanilla for my formative years. I think I have taken DC for granted for too long. My neighbors are black, white, latino, gay. It's normal for me now. It wasn't growing up in Southwest Ohio. I live in a kind of anti-bubble, where everyone is so different and coexisting that I forget how most Americans live in bubbles in the rest of the country.

I feel guilty because I am not at the protests and I keep asking myself why? Is it covid? Is it laziness? Is it that the disillusionment that has plagued me so long makes me believe that this won't change anything?

I struggle to find the words because I know that there are no words to say. I've sat here for the past several nights in DC, a city with 700,000 residents and no congressional representation, watching helicopters and surveillance aircraft overhead and hearing the pop pop pop of militias attacking our own citizens.

What is it about white America that makes them fear The Other so much?

Anyway, don't fall for white supremacist shit like All Lives Matter or norse tattoos or thin blue line flags. Think.

The Unfulfilled

Recently I read a book called A Year of Wonders: A Novel about Plague. It is a fictitious story based on real events that happened in Eyam, England in 1666-1667 during which a town decides to quarantine itself to save others from the bubonic plague that came to their village during the Great Plague of London. Two thirds of the village died, but they saved countless lives by sacrificing their own. They would have spread it everywhere had it not been for the rector of their church convincing them that quarantine was the moral thing to do.

The parallels between the book and our time were striking, right down to social distancing, closing the church, the selfishness of the rich family that left the village, the profiteering gravedigger who even buried one guy alive to take his money, people turning to supernatural things like witchcraft and flagellantism (evangelicalism is the modern witchcraft in our case), mobs who blame the liberals (in this case, two unmarried women well-versed in herbal medicine).

Ultimately, what stopped their plague was getting rid of their worldly possessions. Although they did not yet know about germs (they called them plague seeds so they had some idea,) the rector put two and two together and realized that the plague stuck to these things, so he convinced the town to burn everything. It worked.

Bubonic plague is a bacterial infection that we can now treat with antibiotics, but it wiped out entire towns so many times throughout history. The Black Plague of the 14th century wiped out much of Europe's population. Ironically, it may have ended up making Europe better, as labor was in such short supply that those who survived were able to negotiate much better terms with the wealthy overlords, and a merchant class arose that paved the way for democracy in Europe. In death came rebirth.

We face a choice right now. We can use covid as a means to rebirth, creating a fairer system of economics, government, and justice. The protests happening across the country show that there is a will for change. Indeed, if we don't change, we will all suffer for it. Covid isn't the last pandemic. More will come, some that are far deadly than this coronavirus. And germs don't care what race or political party you are.

But we can't change for the better without sacrifice, especially in giving up our consumer habits that are destroying the world.  Covid hasn't stopped climate change, the greatest threat to humanity in all of history. Buying things got us here. Manufacturing. Cars. Pollution. Fossil fuels. Greed. We prop up the wealthy who maintain the system, as the status quo benefits them, because it is too inconvenient for us to change. Part of that system is cheap labor, and cheap labor thrives on racism.

Covid has earned American billionaires $400+ billion more dollars. The rest of us got a pittance or unemployment. They don't pay taxes. We bear that burden, then they take those tax dollars from us in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and police forces. Now they want everything to reopen because they aren't benefiting from our labor. They don't care if you get sick or if you die. You are replaceable. You are mere "human capital stock" as they have stated.

Police forces in this country were formed specifically to protect the property of the wealthy, a group that 99% of us are not a part. Police are the product of the 19th century. They don't exist to protect us. They exist to protect the interest of the wealthy. They, along with most Americans, have been brainwashed to think police exist because the Big Bad Wolf is gonna come and take their junk.

What if the police enforcing the Broken Windows policy in New York, which put patrols in areas where they saw broken windows, instead fixed those windows? What if we used the resources that WE as taxpayers pay for, to improve the infrastructure of poor areas instead of giving it to massive, well-armed police departments? What if a five year old black boy had a bed instead of a dirty mattress on the floor? What if housing projects had parks and spaces for residents to breathe rather than cramming them all together into tiny apartments? What if those women living in poverty had access to contraceptives, childcare, and health information the way their better off counterparts do? What if we actually spent money on comprehensive schooling in the inner cities that included after school child care, arts programs, and whatever else can help steer kids away from a life of violence, a life many of them are currently born into. What if we got rid of the racist credit system and changing banking so black Americans can have the same starting line as white Americans?

We spend billions of dollars on policing in this country, our tax dollars. What if we trained some of those who would be police in trades like carpentry, electric, plumbing, and other jobs that would focus on fixing those broken windows?

What if Americans truly cared about change?

A Reading from the Book of Covidicus

I am an expert in nothing.

The things I am good at - cooking, landscape photography, maybe garden design, packing suitcases, procrastinating - don't pay the bills in our economic system. I am, however, also good at observing, listening, remembering, and reflecting, useful skills that until recently I didn't recognize as skills at all. It seems that most people don't have them, or choose not to use them, that they are wallowing in oblivion, too consumed by the vacuity of their own existence to look around them. All this time I was just paying attention to things around me and didn't even realize that isn't something normal people do.

That's why Covid has hit them so hard mentally. Despite the fact that experts have been talking about the coming pandemics for two decades now, Americans ignored it and kept electing idiots to offices that have the power to slow or prevent them. And have Americans learned anything?

Have you seen the covidiots who refuse to wear a mask? Have you noticed we are reopening as cases INCREASE? Did you know the Trump regime fired all the pandemic experts when he took office, the same people who kept ebola, H1N1, and other pandemics out of the US prior to his arrival?

South Korea and the US had their first Covid deaths on the same day. South Korea is playing professional baseball right now because Koreans care about their fellow Koreans and because they have competent leaders who actually care about protecting their citizens. We may not have any baseball season. Americans don't care at all. They are mad that they are inconvenienced by lockdowns while real people die. We are going to reopen anyway, and the virus will spread rampantly, and Americans will continue to elect Republicans who refer to them as "human capital stock" instead of "people," and we will fall into a depression worse than that of the 1930s, and people will lose their loved ones and still not care about others, all so billionaires can get richer. Profits over people. It's unreal that even a pandemic can't make Americans care about others.

Oh sure, there are some who do care. Covid has brought out the best in some people. Others may have realized something about themselves. But my god, has it brought out the absolute worst in far too many people. The selfishness. The arrogance. The entitlement. The utter stupidity.

Thing is, Americans have never experienced any real collective adversity. We haven't had a war on our soil since the Spanish American War in 1898. 9/11 was a shock to most people because they never paid attention to foreign policy or what our government has done to other human beings under the guise of national security. Vietnam wiped out a generation of working class men but it took years for Americans to actually care about that, and even then they only cared because they were losing people close to them. Vietnam the country and the conflict was something abstract and they didn't care about that. Americans don't even acknowledge our endless wars in the Middle East.

When you don't pay attention to things, it is easy to be duped by propaganda. Republicans have been using fear of The Other to their advantage for decades. Russians. Muslims. Immigrants. All people oblivious Americans blame for the miseries in their own lives.  Now they blame China for this pandemic.

They should start blaming themselves.

Oblivious Americans have been brainwashed into thinking government is bad by the very people who benefit from no government regulations. Hatred for government is why this pandemic spread like it did. They cut the pandemic teams. They cut funding for the CDC. They handed responsibility for the response to a bunch of businessmen with no medical background.

Government isn't the problem. Rich assholes are the problem, those who steal our tax dollars to make themselves richer. They need your labor to do so, and they steal that, too, in the form of pittance wages, unpaid sick leave, open floor offices, two meager weeks of vacation (if you get any) that most people can't even take, fire at will, layoffs during economic downturns (executives rarely get laid off), etc. You think a CEO deserves 1000% more pay than someone who does the actual work while he plays golf and calls it a meeting? YOU HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED.

They've turned science, which is just the reality of the world, into a political ideology so Teh Stoopids among us will spew their propaganda for them while they eliminate regulations and all government oversight so they can get away with their corruption and the theft of taxpayer money. That's our money. So now we have Teh Stoopids running around screaming that wearing a mask to protect our society from the spread of a deadly disease is against Freedom!(TM) and half of Americans say they won't get a covid vaccine when it becomes available because they are selfish trash who don't understand basic science, and they are doing the bidding of the wealthy who right now aren't making any money from their labor. They actively cheer on spreading the virus while their overlords are dismantling the health care system that they are going to need when they get sick from their stupidity.

They tell you the rich provide "jobs." That word means nothing but the theft of your labor, for you are most likely working for an entity that pays you a pittance of its earnings. Or you are a farmer who has no choice but to sell your products to the massive corporate entities that have taken over our food supply. Or you are self-employed and spend half your time fighting to even get the money you are owed by the people who hired you to do a project. Etc. etc. etc. So much of a corporation's profits go to shareholders who don't work for the company and don't earn a damn thing. A company's profits should go to the people who made those profits - the workers.

During the first wave of the Spanish Flu, 60,000 Americans died. Then we opened everything up and the second wave killed 600,000. All for the sake of profit. Now we are doing it again.

Capitalism is the deadliest economic system. It's time to get rid of it. Make people matter again.

Wear a mask, you selfish ass.

Volcano

New Zealand is built atop volcanoes. Many of them. Many still active. You probably heard about the one that killed a bunch of people last week. You probably wonder why people were there in the first place. It's called living. It's not without risk. What is the point of breathing if all you do is sit on your couch and watch television or sports all your life?

I didn't go to the crater of a volcano, although I had planned to. I was going to hike at Tongariro National Park, one of the first national parks on the planet. I did hike at Tongariro National Park, but I didn't make it to the crater of a volcano because I hadn't realized the time involved. It was four hours to the peak, and that would have required a four hour return or a four hour trek to the other side of the park and a shuttle back. If I were going on an eight hour hike, I'd have to prepare for it, and I hadn't. So I settled for a few hours under the shadow of the volcanoes.

this is what you are missing out on

The drive from Rotorua to Tongariro was about two hours. I stopped in Matamata for lunch, not knowing that it was a tourist trap for the Lord of the Rings crowd, as it was the location for Hobbiton. While I found it somewhat amusing, for the life of me I couldn't understand why, amidst all the natural beauty and adventure, one would come halfway across the world just to visit TV land.

I stayed in a ski lodge called Pipers Lodge in National Park Village, but since it was spring, it was the off season, and there weren't many people. This was the view from National Park Village:

The only volcano I had ever seen in my life was Mount Vesuvius, at least that I am aware of, and here were several snowcapped volcanoes right in front of me.

I drove to one of only two carparks at the park. This side of the park was desert, and it was beautiful.

The weather was, well, spring. It was partly cloudy, or partly sunny, or hailing at one point. The sky and the light were such that it made it tough to take photos without constantly adjusting the settings. (Rather frustrating, and slowed me down considerably.) The hail lasted only a couple minutes, and I was well prepared for weather, so it was all rather beautiful, even if I felt a sense of trepidation as the blackness suddenly appeared from behind the mountains.

how it looked when I set out

suddenly...

the moment before it began to hail

yikes

the white balls are the hail

Tuwharetoa was moody

you have to pay attention

and then it cleared

dream beneath the desert sky

lots of iron in the rocks

I didn't get very far, as I was enamored with the place and kept stopping to take photos and just marvel at how I was there, beneath the shadow of volcanoes, halfway across the world, feeling very fortunate that I am able to do such things and wondering why so many who could also do so choose to spend their lives imprisoned in their living rooms. Again I thought about how our mentally manufactured problems - the ones spread by political propaganda like immigration, terrorism, and inequality - could be drastically reduced if only more people would get out and see the world. Life is so simple. Why do people make it complicated?

There wasn't much else to do in Tongariro, and given that most people who go there during the ski off season do an eight hour hike, why should there be? There is a sports bar, but I was tired and not much in the mood for that. I had a lamb shank dinner and a couple of beers in the lodge and waited for the stars. My star tracker app was open on my phone, but it was pretty cloudy and I couldn't make out many of the constellations. I ventured out for a moment and heard a kiwi somewhere close. I looked for the Southern Cross, the constellation on the flags of both New Zealand and Australia that can only be seen in the southern hemisphere. I wandered to the edge of the driveway. It was quite dark, and the stars, while more numerous than beneath the light pollution of home, were covered by a layer of clouds. I went back to the room. I waited. I waited some more. I turned the lights out and waited and waited and waited until my eyes drooped. I opened the star tracker app and located the direction of the Southern Cross. I leaned out the window and found it.

I went to sleep.