Each moment is a chance for us to make peace with the world.
Thich Nhat Hanh
1. 55 deg. when I got up under cloudy skies. There’s supposed to be a cool down with rain in the next several days. I’m okay with some rain. No cool down today, though. It’s a replay of yesterday with a high of 76.
2. Like most of you, I imagine, I’ve been following the news coming out of Afghanistan. You may remember, I am an economic historian (follow the money), and one of the best analyses I’ve seen reminded me that Afghanistan is terribly, appallingly, poor. The people only survive because of international monetary aid. All the aid from the US, EU, Britain, and the rest of the world has been cut off, so the Taliban has to “play nice”, at least for a little while. They are a fighting force, not at governing one, so they are going to have a hard time. I also remember that revolutions happen in times of rising expectations. The Afghan people have been living lives with rising expectations, so no telling what will happen next.
3. Dinner was steak and mashed potatoes with onion gravy, and black-eyed peas for me, and mixed vegetables for Big Al.
4. HCR’s talk today was about Wounded Knee – both the massacre in 1890 and the occupation in 1970. While I knew the basic outlines of the story, she, of course, filled in a lot of the details that escaped me. I remember reading Dee Brown’s book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. one of the times I was in college.
5. I finished the last available installment of Ted Lasso yesterday. So I’m starting to watch Friday Night Lights on Netflix. I remember reading the book when it first came out. We were living in Abilene, Texas, then, and Odessa Permian was a major rival of my son’s high school. I don’t think I ever watched the TV version before. The book read like a novel, but it was actually a true story.
How about you? What made you happy today?
An Aging Liberal Hippy from the Left Coast 