sparking joy, spreading gloom

I'm reading a New Yorker article by the brilliant, incisive Jane Mayer, about the countless millions in dark money funding Republicans these days, especially their anti-voting initiatives. She points out that in fact, the Trumpers are right; Donald Trump WAS elected president - of white America. The Repubs are determined to suppress voting by minorities, especially black voters, by any means, and they've so far been extremely successful. It's the death of democracy.

And here we have anti-vax lunatics screaming at Trudeau, following him around. Who are these people? What has happened to the human brain, that people violently reject drugs that will save their lives? It's Fox News, other right wing media, and the internet to blame, surely, for the flood of anti-science stupidity, paranoia, and misinformation that's killing informed analysis and has encouraged the viciousness of discourse. 

I'm wondering what world we are living in now, what world our grandchildren will inherit. It's profoundly frightening. Let's not even think, for now, about fires and floods and what they mean.

There was a family crisis late last night, just to let you know that this woman's sunny ways are sometimes tested. But we got through. 

On a brighter note, I spent two solid days moving files around, creating new folders, renaming files to drag into the new folders, opening old stuff to see if it should be stored or transferred to the trash, which makes such a satisfying sound as it sucks in detritus. I feel SO ORGANIZED! However, the work also depressed me, since it showed, again, just how much writing I did for years and years without sending any of it out. In the nineties, I had lots of essays published, and then I stopped, thought if I was working on books, I didn't have time for essays. I started them anyway and left them littered about in bits and pieces in Documents. Now they're in a folder, and the challenge is to do something with them. 

This should take me till the end of my days. 

Loved this cartoon drawn by a Finnish woman, Anna Harmala, a single mother who drew about her experience. (Click to enlarge.)

What she draws here happened to me; the instant my husband and I separated, I was no longer invited to dinner parties. Ever. Not once. I guess I made wives uncomfortable, or just the table arrangement awkward and unbalanced. So I started to invite people often for dinner here, so I'd have an adult to talk to, and my children could hear grownups conversing. Now they're both in the world of hospitality and food, and neither is a vaccine sceptic or a rightwing blowhard. Because they learned to argue and listen and think. 

There's a story there. But I won't write it, at least not yet. I'm too busy excavating files.