Skyline Happenings

From State Senator Jamie Pederson

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Mary Jane F.

Dear friends and neighbors,

The lack of affordable housing and homelessness are two of the primary challenges facing our state. In the last decade, roughly one million people moved to Washington, but only about 250,000 homes have been built. Our housing crisis wasn’t created overnight and it won’t be solved overnight, but I’m proud that the Legislature passed several significant bills and made historic investments this year that will help increase the supply of housing, protect tenants, prevent homelessness, and lower barriers to housing construction.

It is exciting to see housing investments from past legislative sessions take shape. I took this photo last week of the construction of Pride Place, a first-of-its-kind project on Capitol Hill by Community Roots Housing and GenPride. Pride Place will provide affordable housing to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer seniors as well as community space for the LGBTQ+ community.

Building more affordable housing

The passage of HB 1110, the “Middle Housing” bill, will help ensure that city land use policies allow building more homes people can actually afford to rent or buy. More duplexes, fourplexes, and sixplexes provide additional options for family housing to fill in the gap between small apartments and single-family homes. In cities with a population of more than 75,000, the bill allows fourplexes everywhere and sixplexes within a quarter mile of major transit stops. In cities within a population between 25,000 and 75,000, the bill allows duplexes everywhere and fourplexes within a quarter mile of major transit stops. Other major housing bills that passed this session include:

HB 1474 creates a Covenant Homeownership Program to provide down payment and closing cost assistance to help address the generational wealth gap in marginalized communities. Much of that gap arise from our shameful history of restrictive covenants that prevented racial and religious minorities from purchasing homes in certain neighborhoods.
HB 1349 will help protect vulnerable homeowners, particularly low-income households and seniors, from predatory foreclosures.
HB 1337 will reduce barriers to the construction of new accessory dwelling units (ADUs).
SB 5045 addresses the affordable housing shortage by incentivizing homeowners to rent ADUs to low-income households.
HB 1695 expands the definition of “public benefit” to include the use of surplus public property to create affordable housing, including rental and homeownership, targeting low-income households.
HB 1042 will help quickly increase housing supply, by allowing the addition of new dwelling units to existing commercial or mixed-use buildings.
SB 5058 will make it easier to construct small-scale condominiums.
HB 1046 increases the income limit for homes financed by public housing authorities to 80% of the area median income, up from 50% for for-profit entities and 60% for governmental or non-profit developers.
SB 5197 reforms Washington’s eviction process so tenants can use emergency rental assistance funds, allows remote participation in eviction proceedings, and expands judicial discretion around 14-day pay-or-vacate notices.
HB 1074 will help tenants who are moving out of their current rental by increasing transparency and accountability in the handling of their security deposits.
SB 5198 will protect vulnerable tenants in manufactured home communities by requiring owners to give two years’ notice of sale and give the tenants a fair chance to come together and make an offer to purchase the park themselves.

Housing investments

Thanks to state funding and the work of two local nonprofits, Blake House on First Hill now has its first tenants and will provide permanent supportive housing for seniors and veterans coming out of homelessness. The state’s next two-year operating and capital construction budgets adopted by the Legislature last month make significant new investments in more projects like Blake House that will increase affordable housing and reduce homelessness. Here are a few highlights:

$400 million, a record investment, in the Housing Trust Fund for construction and renovation of affordable housing units to serve low-income and special needs populations.
$150 million to start the Covenant Homeownership Program.
$141 million increase for emergency housing and shelter funding.
$60 million for homeless encampment response and rapid rehousing.
$30 million to address youth homelessness.
$27 million increase for the Housing and Essential Needs program.

I look forward to seeing these investments pay off with more affordable housing options for people here in the 43rd District and across the state.

I will continue to send updates on key legislation passed during this year’s legislative session. If you missed my previous updates on gun safety, reproductive freedom, or public education, they are available on my website. Please reach out with any questions at Jamie.Pedersen@leg.wa.gov.

Best wishes, Jamie

Posted in Government, Homeless | Comments Off

Thoughts on Mother’s Day

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Jim deMaine

by Heather Cox Richardson – (Thanks to Pam P.)

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When you’re up to your neck!

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Jim deMaine

New Yorker Cartoons — Peter Kuper | Peter Kuper Art

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My “Rethinking Climate” talk, up on YouTube

Posted on May 8, 2023 by William Calvin

I have been painting a picture of where we are heading if we fail to successfully intervene. That should not be taken to imply that, within decades, debilitation and collapse are inevitable. All you have been hearing is the first two parts of the physician’s three-part presentation to the patient, diagnosis and prognosis. They are not the full conversation. The third part is treatment plan. Shade. Cleanup. Building resilience. All as Manhattan Projects.

Surgeons and oncologists often have this conversation with a patient who has waited until stage 3 cancer develops before getting started on an intervention. Many such patients survive. Possible climate fixes are a topic unto itself, but it is clear that all of them will require design and field-testing on the scale of a Manhattan Project. ↓

Let me summarize:

We need to retire the notion that going on a fossil fuel diet will fix our climate problem. (It is still a good idea for other goals.) If we were actually cleaning up CO2, then emissions reduction would speed up the process somewhat. However, we have yet to start a cleanup. We have our priorities backwards. ↓
Many people think that “Zero Emissions” or “Net Zero” will make the accumulation go away. No. Too little, too late. ↓
After 1985, the land temperature rose three times faster than the ocean surface. Alter the temperature contrast over coastlines and that may change the winds and where they deliver rain—producing droughts here and floods there. ↓
There indeed has been more global drought: the land area in drought doubled between 1983 and 2003. ↓
Global drought and the 21^st century surges in extreme weather pose a much more immediate threat than another fractional degree rise in average surface temperature. ↓

There are now reasons why climate action needs to be big, quick, and sure to work the first time. We are in a new danger zone from which we must escape; collapse will kill faster than heat. Climate action now needs to focus on the short term via creating shade and removing CO2.

The climate crisis has been a lot to wrap our hearts, heads, and strategic policy around. But we now need big interventions before we miss even more exits on the Freeway to Hell.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged climate | Comments Off

Showoff!

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Ed M.

Posted in Animals | 1 Comment

The Panama Hotel opens in Seattle’s Japantown in the summer of 1910.

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Bob P who wrote: “Many years ago, Pam, myself, and two of my relatives from Sweden spent a pleasant time there, with Jan Johnson. It is an interesting place to visit.”

This historic site is memorialized in the wonderful 2009 novel: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Author)

n August 1910, the Panama Hotel opens at 605 1/2 S Main Street, in the heart of Seattle’s Nihonmachi (Japantown). The builder and designer is Sabro Ozasa, a Japanese American architect and graduate of the University of Oregon. The Panama is a five-story workingman’s hotel, with businesses located on the first floor. The businesses include a laundry, a dentist, a tailor, a pool hall, a book store, a florist, and a sushi shop. The upper floors contain single occupant residences. In the basement, there is (and remains to this day) a “sento,” a Japanese-style public bathhouse. The Panama Hotel’s sento, named the Hashidate-Yu, is the only such bathhouse remaining intact in the United States today (2010).

The Sento

The Hashidate-Yu drew on a 1,200-year-old tradition of Japanese bathing. Japanese sentos were a central feature of Buddhist temples, used in purification rites. The temples also provided baths for the general public, since many homes at the time did not have private facilities. Eventually, the religious implications faded, but the sentos continued to be used as gathering places. Japanese immigrants sought out sentos upon arrival in their new communities. The Hashidate-Yu had separate baths — one for men and one for women and children.

Over the years the Panama Hotel served as a home for generations of Japanese immigrants, Alaskan fishermen, and international travelers. The combination of businesses, hotels, and bathhouses provided necessary services for the community. Facilities like the sentos allowed the Japanese immigrants to share their cultural traditions. Before World War II, there were at least four sentos in Seattle: the Hashidate-Yu, the Shimoji, the Hinode, and the Naruto. Most of Seattle’s Nihonmachi, like many across the western United States, disappeared during World War II when the United States government forced 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into internment camps. In Seattle many families packed their belongings into trunks and suitcases and stored them for safekeeping in the hotel’s basement.

Abandoned Property

Sadly, many of the families never returned to collect their belongings. Takashi Hori (who was himself interned from 1942 to 1945), owned and ran the Panama Hotel from 1938 to 1985. He found more than 50 trunks of property and made several attempts to reunite the items with their owners. After the war the Hashidate-Yu bathhouse in the hotel basement was re-opened and was run by Fukuo and Shigeko Sano until the mid-1950s. Sentos gradually fell out favor, as many Japanese Americans felt compelled to abandon their traditions during and after the war. Also, modern houses usually included bathing facilities.

In 1985, Jan Johnson bought the Panama Hotel from the Hori family and began renovations. She too attempted to find the owners of the property left in the hotel. She then took the belongings that were left unclaimed and created a small museum in the basement of the hotel. The artifacts include old Japanese American photographs, a dusty footlocker, a cloth coat with a fur collar, a pair of men’s socks, and other pieces of everyday life. Many of the items have been included in temporary exhibitions at Ellis Island and the Japanese American National Museum.

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Posted in History, In the Neighborhood | Comments Off

Seattle’s first affordable housing high-rise tower in 50 years welcomes its first residents (and it’s on First Hill)

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Mary Jane F.

caption: Blake House makes up the bottom third of this affordable housing highrise on First Hill. — Blake House makes up the bottom third of this affordable housing highrise on First Hill.

This week, people who used to live outside began moving into a new building on First Hill. It’s the first new affordable housing high-rise tower Seattle has seen in 50 years.

It represents a different approach — in terms of scale and strategy — for addressing homelessness in the region.

Kevin Thomas Kiso smiles in a sunlit lobby, inside a concrete, steel and glass high-rise apartment building on First Hill. He has just finished signing his lease, and now holds a new set of keys.

“This is the coolest day of my adult life, and I’m 57 … I spent 20 years sleeping right out here, at the Stimson Green Mansion by the park … the mansion over here,” Kiso says as he gestures out the window. “I spent 14 years in my sleeping bag, with my laptop here. And then I would go to the library and read French literature, like Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Paul Sartre, and Camus.”

Reading the French Existentialists helped Kiso get through a dark time in his life. He got addicted to heroin and spent time in prison. He’s been trying to stay clean ever since. For the last two years, he’s been living in a cubicle at a Salvation Army shelter.

“It was people milling around, and walking by, and rapping, and singing, and talking, and yakking, and you never got a moment of peace and tranquility,” Kiso said of living on the street. “And I know that that’s what I’m being granted here. And silence is going to be kind of frightening at first for me, I believe. The tranquility and … I’m not sure how I’m going to react without sirens blaring and incessant traffic and things telling me to walk and don’t walk.”

Homelessness is a problem with many faces. There are people who need help getting off the streets, and there are many people on limited incomes who need affordable housing, so they don’t get pushed into a cycle that can lead to homelessness. Experts say you have to work at the problem from both directions. The 17-story apartment tower in First Hill is therefore divided into two parts, each with its own entrance and lobby.

The bottom part is called “Blake House.” It provides “permanent supportive housing” for seniors and veterans coming out of homelessness. It’s run by a nonprofit called Plymouth Housing.

The top part is called “The Rise,” and it’s for people on modest incomes, such as teachers, nurses and other health care workers. Another nonprofit, Bellwether Housing, runs this portion.

Kiso is part of the first cohort to move into Blake House. In a few months, he’ll have 112 new neighbors. Above Blake House, another 250 families will live in the Bellwether Housing section.

The tower has a common area lounge with a view of the First Hill neighborhood, including its many hospitals. Paul Schumann uses the lounge as he studies from a medical textbook on his laptop. He moved into this top part of the high rise in March.

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Posted in happiness, Health, Homeless | Comments Off

Brief history of the NRA’s position on gun control

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Heather Cox Richardson May 7

Share For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments for widespread gun ownership rest, is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia.

As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

Today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places.

One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation.

By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges, and in local, state, and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunition and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him.

NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.

But in the mid-1970s a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II.

Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.

Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government.

In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time. When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew.

In 1981 a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, then-representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.

After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.

Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012 the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.

The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns.

Posted in Guns, History | Comments Off

A little more behind the ears please

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Sybil-Ann

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In Berkeley, a Library Protest Is a Fight for Anthropology in an A.I. Age

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Five students stand near a floor-to-ceiling window. To the left are shelves full of books. Long white tables are in the foreground. — At 67 years old, the George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library at the University of California, Berkeley, is set to be closed to save costs.

Thanks to Mike C.

By Tim Arango May 2, 2023 in the NYT

BERKELEY, Calif. — To kick off homecoming weekend last fall, the University of California, Berkeley, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new data sciences building, known as the Gateway. At a cost of over half a billion dollars, the 367,270-square-foot building, with “extended sightlines and natural light-filled corridors,” is being billed as a hub for research in artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning.

That may represent the future, but the past is just a short walk across campus in the stacks of the anthropology library. For decades, the repository has served generations of scholars in a space as modest as the Gateway is grand: a 1,500-square-foot corner on the second floor of the anthropology department’s building, with a cozy reading area of armchairs and computer terminals along one wall.

For days now, the library has become a scene of occupation. Students have filled it with tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses in a last-ditch effort to save the 67-year-old institution dedicated to anthropology, which encompasses the study of humanity, societies and cultures. The university is preparing to move the collections of archaeological field notes and books — about 80,000 volumes in total, on subjects as varied as folk tales, Black culture and Mexican American social movements — to a nearby warehouse and the main library, saving $400,000 annually.

For the student occupiers, the fight is as much a battle over a library as it is over humanities and social sciences in an age when the world is obsessed with technology and seems eager to replace the physical world with virtual experiences driven by A.I.

“It’s about fundamentally writing a different story about what education is, what the university is for,” said Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate student who works at the library and is writing a dissertation about folk art forms of the African diaspora.

Jesús Gutiérrez stands behind a desk that has a laptop computer on a stand. Piles of books are to his left, and signs about checking out books are in front of him.

Students hold signs and march to protest the closure of the anthropology library. One man with a light-colored button-down shirt holds a sign that says “Save Our Anthro Library! Fight for Knowledge.”

In the past five years alone, the number of Berkeley undergraduate students choosing to major in anthropology has dropped by about a quarter, part of a generation that has struggled to pay student loans and flocked toward science and engineering in the lucrative shadow of Silicon Valley.

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Posted in Advocacy, Education, Essays, History | 1 Comment

A Guide to Aging Well

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Looking to grow old gracefully? We can help. (from the NYT)

Joint pain, stiffness and swelling aren’t always inevitable results of aging, experts say. Here’s what you can do to reduce your risk for arthritis.
Getting older is inevitable (and certainly better than the alternative). Here’s how to keep your body tuned up and your mind tuned in.
Memory decline is not inevitably tied with aging. Here are a few simple things you can do to keep you sharp.
Small changes in your eating habits can lower your risk for many diseases associated with aging. These five tips can get you started.
Why does your neck look like it’s aging twice as fast as the rest of you, and what can you do about it? The trick is “prevention, prevention, prevention,” experts say.
Hip fractures are predicted to nearly double worldwide by 2050, according to a new study. Here’s how to avoid them by improving your bone health.
Hair sprouting from the ears and the nose is a normal part of aging for many men. But why does it happen?

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Be prepared!

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Celebrities Pick Their Favorite New Yorker Cartoons | The New Yorker

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For those slippery grab bars

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Jim deMaine

These are easy to apply to your grab bars which are, at times, slippery with soap or water. I found them to be inexpensive on Amazon. Also, they’re good for those sliding throw rugs which are, as you know, a risk for falls. Please comment and recommend other safety tips.

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He bearily survived

Posted on May 3, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Bob P.

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I think I can, I think I can . . .

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Rosemary W.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The Memory Hub activities – May 2023

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Jim deMaine

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Meanwhile, in Florida

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Thanks to Mike C.

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A point of view

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Jim deMaine

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Joe Biden and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Jim deMaine

by David Brooks in the NYT

Joe Biden built his 2020 presidential campaign around the idea that “we’re in a battle for the soul of America.” I thought it was a marvelous slogan because it captured the idea that we’re in the middle of a moral struggle over who we are as a nation. In the video he released this week launching his re-election bid, he doubled down on that idea: We’re still, he said, “in a battle for the soul of America.”

I want to dwell on the little word “soul” in that sentence because I think it illuminates what the 2024 presidential election is all about.

What is a soul? Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

Whether you believe in God or don’t believe in God is not my department. But I do ask you to believe that every person you meet has this moral essence, this quality of soul.

Because humans have souls, each one is of infinite value and dignity. Because humans have souls, each one is equal to all the others. We are not equal in physical strength or I.Q. or net worth, but we are radically equal at the level of who we essentially are.

The soul is the name we can give to that part of our consciousness where moral life takes place. The soul is the place our moral sentiments flow from, the emotions that make us feel admiration at the sight of generosity and disgust at the sight of cruelty.

It is the place where our moral yearnings come from, too. Most people yearn to lead good lives. When they act with a spirit of cooperation, their souls sing and they are happy. On the other hand, when they feel their lives have no moral purpose, they experience a sickness of the soul — a sense of lostness, pain and self-contempt.

Because we have souls, we are morally responsible for what we do. Hawks and cobras are not morally responsible for their actions; but humans, possessors of souls, are caught in a moral drama, either doing good or doing ill.

Political campaigns are not usually contests over the status of the soul. But Donald Trump, and Trumpism generally, is the embodiment of an ethos that covers up the soul. Or to be more precise, each is an ethos that deadens the soul under the reign of the ego.

Trump, and Trumpism generally, represents a kind of nihilism that you might call amoral realism. This ethos is built around the idea that we live in a dog-eat-dog world. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Might makes right. I’m justified in grabbing all that I can because if I don’t, the other guy will. People are selfish; deal with it.

This ethos — which is central to not only Trump’s approach to life, but also Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s — gives people a permission slip to be selfish. In an amoral world, cruelty, dishonesty, vainglory and arrogance are valorized as survival skills.

People who live according to the code of amoral realism tear through codes and customs that have built over the centuries to nurture goodness and foster cooperation. Putin is not restrained by notions of human rights. Trump is not restrained by the normal codes of honesty.

In the mind of an amoral realist, life is not a moral drama; it’s a competition for power and gain, red in tooth and claw. Other people are not possessors of souls, of infinite dignity and worth; they are objects to be utilized.

Biden talks a lot about the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. At its deepest level, that struggle is between systems that put the dignity of individual souls at the center and systems that operate by the logic of dominance and submission.

You may disagree with Biden on many issues. You may think he is too old. But that’s not the primary issue in this election. The presidency, as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”

One of the hardest, soul-wearying parts of living through the Trump presidency was that we had to endure a steady downpour of lies, transgressions and demoralizing behavior. We were all corroded by it. That era was a reminder that the soul of a person and the soul of a nation are always in flux, every day moving a bit in the direction of elevation or a bit in the direction of degradation.

A return to that ethos would bring about a social and moral disintegration that is hard to contemplate. Say what you will about Biden, but he has generally put human dignity at the center of his political vision. He treats people with charity and respect.

The contest between Biden and Trumpism is less Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative than it is between an essentially moral vision and an essentially amoral one, a contest between decency and its opposite.

Posted in Advocacy, Government, Justice, Morality, Politics | 2 Comments

Thoughts from Emerson

Posted on April 27, 2023 by Jim deMaine

Ed note: I’ve just ordered the book, Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson. Have any of you read it? It’s about how Emerson, Thoreau and William James responded to the greatest losses of their lives. Please comment!

“Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

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