Falling thoughts

The weather turns quickly here, and last night the quilt was necessary. Once, many years ago I walked into a copse of trees and thought that my entrance provoked the sudden outburst. But then I wondered if the singing had anything to do with me or whether I just happened to enter a conversation already in progress. It has rained heavily these past few days and the wind has blown strong, and today I note that the yard is filled with leaves torn from their branches and that the trail on which I run is softened with fallen leaves. And I wonder whether the rains and winds are meant to blow the leaves off of the trees and usher in Fall, or whether the leaves would have fallen off of the trees anyway, having reached the limits of their lives. I guess I’m wondering about intentionality.

The dream was difficult—a fight with the daughter—but the fight took place in exactly the wrong place, and so I knew that the daughter in the dream was not the daughter in life. Who was it? It was me. It was I. I think we are everyone in our dreams, but we choose different personalities to represent different aspects of our selves. Maybe this was a dream about forgiving myself. And what for exactly?

Fall brings politics, and politics brings upsetting and unpleasant rhetoric. This year, what with the Tea Party-ers and the Republican Party and the unacceptable number of bigots given sanction by the first listed two entities, I anticipate that the level of offensive language will sink to an historic and dangerous low. The hate and disrespect replete in the talk is evidence of contempt not only for those to whom they speak, but for the entire democratic process they mean to control. They practice a version of American fascism, and it terrifies me. I worry about our children’s future.

I will enter the classroom this Fall and caution students who would be teachers that these politicians will volubly and viciously accuse the schools and the teachers for the failure of American society, but I will tell my students that these politicians are themselves to blame for whatever failure they report, but that they are too cowardly to acknowledge their complicity or to do anything serious about improving education in the schools. Without a scapegoat they would be too visible in their perfidy. A doctor with a pen knife, no matter how skilled, cannot perform brain surgery. A public critically aware might not tolerate such empty and malicious speechifying.

No, I will not again rant: I go now to other affairs.