It’s a big day in a boy’s life when he gets his very own Medicare card.
It never seems like it in August, but there are upsides to gardening in a hot state.
Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
Possible book plate for ““Ex Libris Jim Rain”; I like it, but I’m creeped out that it’s AI generated from a prompt I gave. (Esp. because my daughter is an illustrator. What does this bode for her?)
I’ve become convinced that this election isn’t really about Harris and Trump. But I haven’t figured out what, exactly, it is about. (I mean, I know what it’s about for Trump, but I don’t know about Trump voters. Or the country.)
Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts creator):
Sometimes it is the very people who cry out the loudest in favor of getting back to what they call “American Virtues” who lack this faith in our country. I believe that our greatest strength lies always in the protection of our smallest minorities.
… you might conclude that this country has a leadership problem. But it doesn’t. This country has a citizenship problem.
(That’s Jupiter, I think.)
Before Trump took his golden escalator ride, life was different. Then, even if I thought a candidate would make a terrible office holder, I rarely thought he or she was objectively a bad person. Even LBJ, and he was pretty bad on a personal level, or Nixon, who was pretty bad as a leader. One consequence was, while I might have thought folks who supported “the other guy” naive or misguided, I didn’t think of them as bad either.
But Trump by any measure is actually a bad, bad man. And he’s bad in many, many ways. So, that makes my response to his supporters quite a problem. In my life, there are folks I love who definitely will vote for that bad, bad man. I know those folks are not themselves irredeemably bad. But I cannot help but wonder, “What is wrong with them?”
And that is one important reason this is all so exhausting.