2019

The sun is coming back!

Minneapolis, at roughly the 45th parallel, north, has gained eight minutes of daylight since solstice.  Almost every day this time of year where I live I find myself in the place of a primeval person watching the daily sky and the declining arc of the sun and worrying if the radiant ball of life would this time descend below the horizon and not come back, just keep going wherever it goes.  We’ll be stuck with artificial lights forever.

And yet still, people emerged in ancient times who went to great extents to build apparatus to prove on a specific day the sun will peep trough a specific hole on earth, proving hope.  Hope for us humans that the universe might be a predictable system of questions and answers.  George Harrison gets credit for summing it up in the modern era, “Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, and it’s all right.”

Last year was a weird year.  You literally couldn’t swing a dead cat without scratching somebodies eyes out.  Meaning, the level of outrageous and offensive rhetoric, bad humor, bad english, insensitive metaphors and fandangling with truth kept rising with the public’s irresistible urges to watch ever so closely to shocking, ugly things.  You don’t want your eyes scratched, wear safety goggles, or don’t look at the dead cat.  And don’t question whoever’s swinging it.

The most audacious thing in the world that happened last year was the killing of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.  It stands out from all the detentions and assassinations of journalists last year because it was clearly a state sponsored execution committed within diplomatically recognized sovereign territory inside another sovereign country and executed as if the world would never know, and yet the state security apparatus of the Saudi state failed to anticipate or secure its consulate facility against comprehensive surveillance by the host state of Turkey.  Maybe more audacious about it is Turkey publicly acknowledging its spywork.  Turkey is not known as a nation friendly to journalists.  Saudi Arabia meanwhile can’t believe Turkey would rat them out.  The Saudi monarchy seethes with insecurity.  Did they drop the ball in surveillance protection at Istanbul because it was merely a consulate, not an embassy?  Heads will surely roll.  That’s how it’s done there.  Nobody has come forth yet with writings or tapes or such from Khashoggi himself which would illuminate what he knew about the regime of the Crown Prince that Khashoggi might have exposed which might predict the collapse of the royal kingdom, just as the Prince is trying to cash out, making Khashoggi literally an enemy of the state, eligible for beheading under Saudi law, such as there is law in Saudi Arabian jurisdiction.  Instead of asserting its sovereign rights under its sovereign laws, what one would expect from a monarchy of the status of Soviet Union or Red China, the Arabian Crown regime has to find a Plan B — nobody apparently anticipated, in this modern age of digitalysis, there would be true documented proof of Khashoggi’s murder, except the Turks.  So the Saudi rulers have to try to weasel out of this one by any means necessary, which means Khashoggi must have been very important.  Important enough to enlist the influence of the President of the United States to equivocate its case to trivialize the incident in the eyes of the world.

This concept of a free press the United States is so famous for in its Bill of Rights of the foundation of its government has been a key attraction to subsequent democracies since the 18th Century and the very age of the written word and the printing press.  Authoritarian and Totalitarian states have striven to control the spread of information to control power.  In our age it’s to control the information itself.  It’s dismal to read that the USA ranks around 35th in the world in freedom of the press when you might think it could be the leader, or at least in the top ten.  But it is encouraging that there are countries with even freer press than ours in a world where most countries have it worse.

In America the free press includes newspapers, books, pamphlets, magazines, TV, radio, social media and websites such as this one and many others more popular and less obscure.  President Donald J Trump routinely attacks the press — forgive me for using the old fashioned term for the press to mean all mass media — for publishing and posting fake news, and for this he calls the press the enemy of the people.  Neither he nor any of his spokespersons nor his corps of supporters have articulated what he means by fake news or offered examples, implying all news is fake unless he himself validates it as real news.  The lies he has told and endorsed are public records.  He communicates to the world via the most free network of vulgar democratic press the world has ever seen.  No one can stop him from his freedom of speech.  And no one should, as agonizingly pathetic and hair on your neck dangerous as they tend to get.  Free country.  You don’t see him giving Mark Zuckerberg a hard time about farming out Facebook data to make mercenary hits on user data, more digitalysis, not how Congress is investigating how to regulate and maybe even tax the internet to somehow keep it free and simultaneously safe from corrupt abuse.

A little over two years ago an enterprise directed by the Kremlin used digitalysis techniques to infiltrate American internet media to campaign on behalf of Donald J Trump for President, and Trump won.  He keeps repeating his mantra, no collusion, though throughout his campaign he tantalized his skeptics by asking the Russians to keep hacking his opponents to look for dirt.  More secret dirt.  The Russians plausibly deny all charges the Justice Department has made and the State Department has substantiated against them for acting to destabilize the American presidential election of 2016 to help elect Trump.  Except to know specifics of the federal statute it’s hard to reconcile freedom of speech with prosecuting anybody including a foreign state for expressing favor for a political point of view and influencing an election.  After all, the US Supreme Court has ruled corporations are entities entitled to free speech rights, why not foreigners?  What hurts about Russian influence in that election is the realization that the Russians apparently speak english better than we do.

The Russian government believes there is no such thing as democracy.  It’s a myth.  And no such thing as truth.  Thus they lie and expect nobody will do anything about it, and they expect nobody to believe them.  And nobody does, not even their own citizens.  The American government has imposed sanctions against Russian oligarchs and institutions for invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea and various other international infractions, but it appears for now to be no big deal.  The world seems to accept that the Russian political system condones jailing and killing journalists and political opponents (troublemakers) and has thousands of ways to ruin somebody’s life.

No collusion, he says, and yet Donald J Trump has always expressed an enamoration for the Russian country and especially its leader Vladimir Putin.  Nobody except maybe Trump himself knows why.  Maybe it’s because Russia is a vast country with untapped riches.  He might admire its rich history and culture, although that’s not likely because he doesn’t follow history and prefers cultural ignorance as his baseline.  More likely it has to do with real estate and fossil fuel.  His fanboy crush on Vladimir Putin is much easier to understand in terms of how Trump sees himself as a player in an international league of strong man boss daddies, and Putin is a proven authoritarian over a world power.  Trump admires how Putin runs Russia and keeps order in its part of the world and he probably envisions a more stable world if the United States and Russia were allies (forget those punk states of Europe) and he and Putin could be friends, deals could be made, and some kind of new world order could emerge where all the true strongmen of the world would get together — maybe at Mar-a-Lago, we don’t know — to divide up the planet, secure peace and harmony, eradicate terrorism, solve famine, end gang wars and drug cartels, repatriate refugees and resettle asylum seekers…  Always assume positive intent.

If Trump ever spoke the truth it might sound something like, yes I think being allies with Russia in the 21st Century is a good idea, we have much in common and could learn a lot from them about keeping social order in this crazy world.  We’ve collaborated nearly a century now in space exploration and it’s time we stopped facing off each other over Europe and get together on this Earth and combine our great countries’ fortunes and intellects and band together to reshape the political and social destiny of this planet.  Yes, so what I used Russians to help my campaign but who cares, there’s nothing wrong with getting help where you can get it to advance a great and beautiful cause, which is the Trump presidency.

He really believes he is God’s gift.  He should say so more often.

Instead he hides the truth, and hides from the truth, and the real news is not news at all, just a long well known fact, Donald J Trump is fake.  And everyone who believes in him is as low, corrupt, deceitful, dishonest, unfaithful, disloyal, conniving, untrustworthy and soulless as he is because deep down they all want to be like him, they are all frauds at heart.  He seeks approval from deplorable people who espouse Nazi and Confederacy dogma.  He exploits plain people with human grievances to pit the shafted against the jacked.

He says he promised to build a Wall, and if he doesn’t get money for his Wall he will look foolish to those who expect him to fulfill that promise.  After all the lies he has told you might think he has some way he could weasel his way around the Wall and blame it on somebody else, or even say, hey, I’m the leader here, and I rethought the Wall, I don’t like the idea any more and I’m taking it off the table to negotiate a fix to the immigration system.  No, instead he’ll proudly wear the mantel of the one who shut down the government instead of funding it without money for his Wall.

He promised he would Drain the Swamp too, and now that they have stopped picking up trash and emptying porta-potties at the national parks it appears he has broken that promise by filling the swamp back up again.

Not to mention the people he has retained to work on his staff and in his cabinet.

It’s a shame the Republican party sold its soul to get him elected but they will reap what they sown.  Confused between conservative governing principles and right wing dictatorial powers they risked common sense democracy to allow radicals to give cover to right wing causes, and lost causes.  A mid-term election puts a Democratic party majority in the House of Representatives, and they will use their clout to investigate every shady inch of the president’s tailored suit.  It’s a shame the outgoing House traded its majority in a squandered deal to shield this president to advance conservative goals.  The Senate will have to reconcile sound legislation with the president they have cut way too much slack.

Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail the past year was as pathetic as a lounge act on its last leg.  He conjured up visions of the caravan of asylum seekers, the migrants from Central America making their way towards the southern US border, as a force of invaders — bad dudes.  He conjured fearsome hordes.  He conjured an assault.  He called up troops.  He ordered more concertina barbwire.  He made a point of saying publicly that the border troops were authorized to shoot back if attacked.

Used to be the United States billed itself as the most humanitarian country on the planet.  We had the Peace Corps, an invention of that liberal president Kennedy’s administration.  And we used to put a lot of money into the United Nations — which the US founded in San Francisco.  There was the Marshall Plan.  All over the world wherever you saw the American flag there was a source of charity emanating underneath.  Think of all the well-intentioned missionaries of all kinds of faiths the American churches spun out into the Third World back when there was a Third World.  If there was a national disaster the Americans were there to help.  As recently as the Obama administration, Americans helped draft the Paris climate accords.

Now we are the xenophobic people who need border walls and tariffs to protect our bitcoin, who live in constant fear of shooting each other with guns over opioids.  Who are too snobby to overtip NATO for good service and too cheap to toss a coin to UNESCO.

Here in Minneapolis there is a charity shelter called Sharing and Caring Hands, whose founder Mary Jo Copeland says in her solicitation for funds around Christmastime, “To the world you might be one person, but to that one person you might be the world.”  And I’d go, what?  I mean, I get what she means but literally it doesn’t make sense.

Still, in the most liberal sense, it applies to Donald J Trump and America.  He represents us Americans to the world.  He shoves the president of Montenegro out of the way to get position in a group photo of world leaders.  He insults leaders of allied democracies and cozies up to autocrats and dictators.  He shows no kindness towards victims of affliction.  He shares no sincere empathy for the aggrieved.  He’s indifferent to the plight of diaspora and the inhumane causes of refugee migration.  He bullies the weak.  He lies egregiously about what he’s up to.  He caves to the most special of Special Interests rolling back environmental protection regulations and the oversight of public lands.  Now his administration wants to roll back civil rights protections.  His government shutdown effectively locks out hundreds of thousands of government workers off their jobs and forces about as many to work without pay, as if to say, “Tough Titty.”  Worldwide he’s making us look really bad.

America First is his slogan.  Used to be that meant when a challenge was offered somewhere in the world America was a first responder to try to do the right thing.  Granted, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a gley, it’s been said (in reference to Donald J Trump’s Scot heritage) but there are worst laid plans in this world too, and they too can go awry.  (Brexit.)  Nationalist isolationizing incurs local tribal quarrels for fake unity in the face of Them.  Them is us.  It’s been incumbent of Americans to go for first in leading the world in more than gymnastics.  The American cultural treasury has led the world in accomplishments in medicine, industrial technology, agricultural yields, textiles, intellectual productivity and fathoms more, and thus the world itself has generated accomplishments all over the planet aided by American influence, if not inspiration.  It is a global world.

The Chinese are the first to set up a base on the dark side of the moon.  How did they learn how to do something like that?

Back on earth NASA is shut down over funding for the Wall to wall off a piece of earth as seen from outer space as a slice of North American desert and mountains.  How much federal bridge and highway maintenance can you get for $5 billion if you want to pour concrete and erect steel that will actually do something, go somewhere?

Wall Street doesn’t like this Wall stuff either.  It’s starting to affect Walgreens and Wal Mart.  And Walla Walla.  Even Wall Drug.  Walnuts.  Wally the Beer Man.  WALL-E.  It affects us all.  What would the Waltons do?

Yes, last year was a weird year.  Wildfires in California and Greece took tolls of paradise and burned it to hell.  Hurricanes and tsunamis wiped out towns, earthquakes toppled dwellings and liquified people like swallowing them in jelly.  Volcanoes burned molten paths to the sea.  June was the deadliest month of all 323 mass shootings in the United States, though the deadliest single incident occurred in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.  The US and its allies launched an air attack against Syrian chemical weapons sites for using gas bombs against its own civilians, again.  Donald J Trump met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore.  He met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.  He fired his Secretary of State, Attorney General, dismissed another Chief of Staff, took the resignation of his Secretary of Defense and got a sketchy Supreme Court nomination past the Senate.  All while two of his former henchmen pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal felonies.  Trump also signed legislation reducing sentencing terms for non-violent crimes, including white collar crimes.

The special investigation of illegal tampering with the 2016 presidential election conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller is under no pressure from a timetable to come to conclusions, as long as it takes to find the truth.  Trump’s lawyer, former mayor of New York and former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani went right to the top of the pops declaring in a live TV interview about the Mueller investigation, “Truth isn’t truth.”

And emoluments are just skin softening creams in hand lotions.

What will be revealed by the Mueller investigation and anything committees of the House of Representatives make public may not rise to treason or high crimes and misdemeanors, but it should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what a shrewd sleazy shady dealer is Donald J Trump.  Maybe there’s enough proof to indict him on something when he leaves office, put him under arrest as his successor is sworn in, but it’s all two bit swindling and pulling legal strings and tax dodges, third mortgages and dubious cross transfers of assets.  How many more minions and stooges might face jail time on his behalf, depending how shallow his organization really is, is less likely to matter as much as what havoc those same minions and stooges might wreck in carrying out whatever insidious mission they think they are on to Make America Great Again.

The president has had a bunch of chances and keeps dropping the ball.  Instead of coming out the better man he comes away as the bigger dick.  I did not endorse him or vote for him, and campaigned against him.  He’s been in office two years, so nobody can say I didn’t give him a chance.  Someday he will be out of office and nobody can say he didn’t have a chance.  Any time and place Trump could have asserted the power of his presidency to put the nation’s best angels ahead of his blatant ego, but time after time he surrenders to the urges of his snake brain and he makes a statement, decision or proclamation sabotaging the sacred ideals that made this country admired, even loved.  When he said he would make America great again he didn’t say he was going to make it Not Great first.  You talk about a president taking the country the wrong direction.

The way Trump blew off the Khashoggi murder was the last Camel.

He is privy to all the evidence and the secret intelligence of the Deep State and instead of outrage that the monarch state of Saudi Arabia executed a journalist he passively deferred blame and recused himself from moral contemplation.  After all there’s $110 billion in arms sales at stake where the Chinese and the Russians would love to jump right in.  Right.  The Saudis are going to recalibrate all their defense technology going forward on the fly and welcome Kremlin agents and very friendly comrades of Xi Jinping, all with deep states of their own — not so fast, nobody wants to be a Saudi monkey boy except Donald J Trump and it may seem the Russians and Chinese can afford to bide their time milking the Arabs building a new Silk Road, perhaps through New Kurdistan, fostering Syria to keep a Mediterranean port, and Persia facing the gulf at Hormuz, while Americans try to reconfigure its own borders to regulate its 2020 census, the rest of the world can go take a hike.

Like the mantra on the backside of Melania Trump’s stylish coat: I DON’T CARE DO U.

My mom used to refer to a condition called Inverted Eyeballs.

For all the fun of demonstrations, rallies, caucuses, media coverage and hilarity it would provide, impeachment isn’t going to happen.  It would take two years anyway, and by then he can be simply unelected.  Impeachment would incite some of the most deplorable people to deplorable acts to save their fuhrer, and it would not be a cleansing bloodshed.  We can learn our lesson the long way.  There is much to come out about the shenanigans of Donald J Trump when his tax returns are made public and everybody learns how leveraged he is and how he effectively launders his money, and maybe his entanglements with the Kremlin may prove more sinister and embarrassing than imagined, but by the time any impeachment charges brought to the Senate would be moot, his presidency will be done, not worth the trouble to kick him out even a month early.

This same Senate, a 52 – 48 Republican majority, is the next bastion of restraint of Trump’s executive overreach.  His imperial impulses.  His autocratic urges.  His crybaby presidency.  The Senate has actual power to override vetoes of sensible legislation.  This is a great opportunity for the Republican party to move towards un-nominating him from the head of their ticket in two years.  If all he has going for him is his troop of core believers, Trump hasn’t got enough to win re-election.  Senators who buck that trend do so at their own peril.

Even so, he will not go quietly (unless he gives himself a stroke) and the tomfoolery and flimflammery will go on.  My hope for the coming year (or two) is that if Donald J Trump remains in office he is virtually neutered, all checked and balanced so he can cause no more harm to the United States or to the world.  The lamest of ducks.  His justification for what he does is, “I’m president and you’re not.”  Sad.  But true.

Sad that Trump has even corrupted the word sad.

Sad for me to think Donald J Trump beggars so much of my reflective time.  That his presence in the world matters so much and seems to permeate the soul of every human relationship, transactional and personal.

Two years ago in Mexico I got to know a local guide and philosopher named Fernando who said Trump was a good thing and who wanted to bet me a hundred dollars USD that in a year I would be better off than I was that day shortly after Trump’s inauguration.  I didn’t take that bet because I didn’t want to take his money, but it turned out I would have owed him, I was better off a year ago.  Last year in Mexico I asked after him, intending to pay up, but I learned the previous summer he died of pancreatic cancer.  This year though I’m not so well off, though I’m better off than Fernando.  I think somehow I owe his family.  That’s 2000 pesos.  I’d like to know what he thinks of Trump now.  And who is this AMLO guy?  Are there any Honduran or Salvadoran caravan refugees working in Zihuatanejo?

Last year in my city, Minneapolis, city of lakes, city of Prince, city of plenty, a homeless community settled into a tent encampment on state highway land adjacent to a main transportation artery, a freeway.  On a strip of grassy green space abutted by a tall concrete wall sound barrier and a bike and walking path along a busy six lane highway a campground settlement grew throughout the summer to around 300 tents and a lot of people extending a few blocks from a main underpass business district to a public park and soccer field along the big sound wall separating the highway noise from the residences on the other side.

The encampment seemed to emerge overnight and didn’t go away.  It achieved instant urban notoriety.  Not the first homeless encampment in an American city, nobody seemed to see this one coming.  Now there it was.  Out there on highway 55 near the Franklin Ave rail station, just off I94 and I35W, near the Cedar exit going south, hundreds of camping tents pitched on the grass between the freeway and the wall and people with backpacks roaming in between them.  All in full view of commuters and tourists and truckers and strangers passing by.  There were cooking fires at night.

Significant about this phenomenon is what did not happen.  Nobody panicked and drove the squatters off the highway land with pickets.  The cops did not swoop in with SWAT teams and paddywagons.  The National Guard did not deploy.  No tear gas.  No bull horns.  No marchers.  No rousts.  No threats.  And no political grandstanding.

The encampment was allowed by all authorities to remain in place until some form of true housing could be found for every person camping there.  This meant intense collaboration between the city, the county, the state (highway land) and a whole coalition of social service agencies and nonprofits, volunteers and faith based organizations to succeed in relocating everyone justly and peaceably.

A large proportion of the campers were Native American Indians, drawn to the site by its proximity to the Phillips neighborhood, home to the largest urban Indian population in America on the other side of the freeway wall.  Some dubbed the site the Wall of the Forgotten, a direct reference to the displacement and oppression of Indians over the centuries.  Right away Indians asserted leadership in keeping order within the encampment and bringing help to the campers.  Indian social service groups based in the nearby neighborhood reached into the encampment to offer housing and health service mediation and intervention.  The site attracted volunteers from medical services and every kind of expertise available.  Donations of food, clothing, blankets and tents came.  The police visited frequently to hang around and get to know the crowds, and no incidents of arrests or confrontations were reported or cases of larceny or assault.  Teepees were erected as meeting centers.

Journalists visited the encampment.  They interviewed the campers and posted stories of hard lives.  Destitution all so familiar and still hard to fathom.  The site seemed to come together from people camping under bridges and here and there in the shadowy hiding places of the Twin Cites, Minneapolis and St Paul, the fringes of parks and old railroad yards, dead end alleys, abandoned garages and what’s left of slums, attracted to the safety of a community of numbers like themselves, totally homeless but maybe not so hopeless.  A lot of single women with kids — these were the early success stories of the social service activists and urban missionaries helping to triage the individual circumstances to place them in true housing.  Bringing so many homeless together in one place and drawing them from their hiding places here and yon not only drew public attention to the homeless population in our midst as a kind of refugee migration of our own underclass, it provided them with security and secured their freedoms without locking them up.

Naloxone became a familiar word associated with the encampment when stories of drug overdoses made the news.  Four fatal overdoses occurred over the existence of the encampment.  Conflict emerged between users and those who wanted to stay clean and scuffles broke out evicting dealers.

Through the summer and into autumn the best minds and hearts of the arts of social science met to make plans and policies to not only move the people out of the encampment by this winter but also develop an ongoing network of methods to effectively keep up with homelessness before it happens.  While elected officials and neighborhood organizers kibbutzed among nonprofit coordinators, churches, educators, clinicians, physicians, politicians, soup kitchens, electricians and musicians, what to do to move three hundred-some people and their tents off Highway 55 before it gets really cold.  Alternative sites were proposed and discussed when it became clear that an already heavily burdened social welfare system couldn’t possibly work that fast to get that many people with problematic residential histories placed in structured housing facilities.  It looked like somewhere in the city would exist a few blocks of FEMA-style temporary trailers, if only suitable ground could be found.  Nobody could estimate how many people the site would have to accommodate who wouldn’t by then be diverted into true housing, the population at the encampment kept growing even as the social service groups almost magically kept placing people who fell through the cracks.  There was worry about people refusing to leave the encampment, talk about taking a stand for that track of land, and others worried about being driven into an asphalt concentration camp.  This was a very delicate humanitarian situation.  Nobody gave up.

Highway 55 through Minneapolis is locally called Hiawatha Avenue.  That part of the city grew with a peculiar affection for a particular popular author and poet, a Bob Dylan of his era, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Avenues all over that part of town, two lakes, a famous creek and falls are named for his characters, more than a few of them Native American Indians like Hiawatha and his sweetheart Minnehaha, both of them busy avenues that run parallel to each other two blocks apart.  Hiawatha is a busy state highway that runs diagonal through the city grid that tries to mimic north, south, east, west and creates a transportation wedgie into the city following a bee-line straight from Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers over land to downtown Minneapolis and the site of the most powerful flour mills of its age, St Anthony Falls.  That beeline exist today as the direct route between downtown and the airport and includes the light rail line.  It’s what’s left of an unaltered trade route between an army outpost and bread.

So the Hiawatha Encampment it was called, or the highway 55 encampment to be more politically correct.  The Wall of the Forgotten was more or less forgotten, or at least forgiven in the sight of its fame.  The actual wall of concrete is at least thirty feet high and runs several blocks along residential Phillips neighborhood bordering a town home development called Little Earth, where a lot of Indians live.  The architecture of the wall is molded in decorations of Native American designs and features a soft blue accent, a pleasant look actually for a highway barrier.  It made a cozy backdrop to the array of tents and the teepees.

The Red Lake Nation, home of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, a reservation located in northern Minnesota, recently bought a chunk of property across Hiawatha Ave from the Little Earth housing which was the site of an old kaput manufacturing plant.  The long range plan of the Band was to develop units of affordable apartments, being near the rail station and the Franklin Avenue corridor.  Red Lake Nation stepped up to offer the site as a place for temporary relocation of the Hiawatha encampment providing a way the site could be demolished and cleared suitably to house people.  The city, county, private donors and who knows who moved heaven and earth to level the site, but it still took time.

Winter approached.  A cold November.  A goal to have the encampment vacated by December first looked unattainable.  The highway department put up a fence between the freeway and the encampment to keep the snowplows from spraying snow at the tents.  It became a gated community.  Fires broke out in tents where makeshift camp stoves were tried as heaters.  Medical emergencies increased with cold weather.  Any time you drove past there was a fire truck standing by with an ambulance.  Anyone illusioned with romance for this hobo jungle adventure need not apply.

Eventually the Red Lake property was rendered habitable.  It consisted of four large fabric tents like big quonset huts.  Three tents would be used for domeciles and sleeping, screens available for privacy, the fourth ten a community center, dining, health and sanitary and showering facilities.  They called it a Navigation Center, a temporary place to get help to find true housing and to find resources available to mitigate whatever problems cause the homelessness.  Administration of the Navigation Center was assured by a coalition of social service organizations.  People started moving around Christmas.  Between finding true housing for some and the promise of help through the Navigation Center, the encampment dwindled and disappeared.  After the last ones left, free rides provided by the highway patrol, the gates through the snow fence were padlocked with no trespassing signs posted.  The grounds were groomed and rendered trash free.  Recent snow glossed over the scars on the erstwhile lawn, and with its fence it looks along the wall like a cemetery without headstone markers.

The deal with Red Lake is to keep finding alternate space for those who seek shelter there.  Substance use within the Navigation grounds is prohibited although intoxicated users will be admitted, and treated.  The land is still intended to be developed into apartment housing soon, so even this temporary shelter will be temporary.  The missionary work continues.

What draws me to dwell on this little saga is its comparison and contrast to my obsession with the malfeasance and maladaptation of the Trump administration.  Here in my home town a humanitarian crisis emerged, and over time, a relatively short time, the powers that be and powers that aren’t usually to be worked out navigation policies and procedures to solve the crisis, if not once and for all at least towards that goal in an ongoing way.  In a year of weirdness all over the world, in my home town a community set sights on a project with dozens of cultural ramifications and made it happen, somehow, some way.  My city came to the rescue — not just city hall, but the city of fellow citizens — to do something moral and upright about a phenomenon nobody really wants to look at, think about and talk about because this is America, because this is America.

This gives me hope for the new year.  Here in a flawed place and time I see hope and hope for more hope for the human race.  By this I mean hope for the planet because humanity is not about to relinquish or abdicate its assertion of dominion but can only concede to nature as if practicing the Serenity prayer — owning up to responsibility for altering the biosphere and conceding that nature is beyond control.  Accepting humanity’s responsibilities and coordinating efforts to improve life is more than theoretical sociology, it can be practiced in everyday expressions not necessarily political of intent but sincere.  And this comforts me about my community.

What I will remember most about last year and what gives me more hope is the birth of Vincent and Amalie’s baby they named Neko Roxanne.  My son and his wife had been arduously trying to have a baby for several years.  Neko is the third grandchild for Roxanne and me and Roxanne’s first namesake.  Vincent and Amalie’s first child.  It’s been a long time since we’ve taken care of a baby.  The elder two grandkids are grown up enough for Book Club and here we go again with basic la la la.  And so it begins all over again like with Clara almost fourteen years ago, and the Tess almost three years later, Granpa Kelly comprises his personal guidance of a new human being.  Roxanne as ever is such a world class grandma everybody who knows her wishes she were their grandma.  With the benefit of experience and innovation along the way I hope to impress her precious mind with all the wonders of the world available to a grandpa, which usually comes back many fold to me in nice little life lessons of existential meaning.  A new hand to hold.

So happy new year to all with hope for all for civic virtue and personal relationships creating loving bonds and tides of joy.

Thank you all for reading and following this chronicle of passion.

 

BK