Frankly, I am just stunned that the voters of the United Kingdom decided to leave the EU. Obviously I am not British, and I can’t pretend I understand all of the issues going on there that might motivate people to vote that way. But I do know that many of the consequences predicted were not good. And I also know that many of the people who voted to leave are in the parts of the UK that depend on the EU the most, like Cornwall. The government of Cornwall is now insisting that the UK government make up for the 60 million pounds a year of EU funding that will be lost by Brexit. To quote from Cornwall directly:
Prior to the referendum we were reassured by the ‘leave’ campaign that a decision to leave the EU would not affect the EU funding which has already been allocated to Cornwall and that Cornwall would not be worse off in terms of the investment we receive. We are seeking urgent confirmation from Ministers that this is the case.
Suddenly Cornwall is like some teenage kid who seriously pisses off his parents, and then suddenly doesn’t understand why they aren’t going to pay his college tuition anymore. You guys really didn’t think this through, did you? And you believed everything that the Leave Campaign told you?
Oh, dear.
You know, that would be comical if it wasn’t so damn tragic, because there are going to be real consequences now, which will affect a lot of people’s lives.
In the last two days something interesting has happened here on our humble little blog. We’ve had 978 hits from The Great White North. In 48 hours.
I wish I could tell you that something one of us had written was brilliantly funny or had gone viral, but somehow I doubt that’s the case. While both days were fairly international and we did have visitors from around the world and, indeed, our total hit count was more than just the Canadian total for both days, something’s up.
Fifty two years ago tonight, three young men were murdered by a group of white Mississippians in the Ku Klux Klan. Among the men complicit in this crime were members of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s office and the Philadelphia (Mississippi) Police Department.
This was a mere six years before I was born. Many people of my generation are familiar with this event through the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, although the film doesn’t even cover everything that happened that awful summer.
This weekend, Episode Nine of Season Six will finally be out, and I have to say I have been looking forward to this for a long, long time. Die, Boltons, die.
So here are my predictions, based on the still photos and brief video clips from the episode that we have seen so far.
Kelly and I have both been shocked, horrified, and angry over what happened in Orlando. Truly, it is stunning to me that such a thing could happen, and even more stunning that we as a society could keep allowing these events to happen over and over and over again.
Kelly vented a lot of anger in her earlier post, and there’s nothing more I can say about how we feel about this. But I want to be a little specific about some of the intellectually dishonest arguments being made by people around the country trying to explain all this away. I also want to talk about two people who were there, and who did everything they could to save people’s lives, and still couldn’t save everyone. They are still heroes, even if they themselves probably don’t feel that way, and probably wouldn’t use that word.
Despite living on the very cusp of the middle class and constantly worrying that one slip will send us spinning into a void from which we won’t be able to return, Geoff and I enjoy a lot of privilege. We’re white, we’re straight, we’re cis gendered, and, though we live in an expensive area of the country, we live in a fairly safe area of the country. Gun ownership isn’t very high and health care is good here. It’s isn’t nearly as hard to get good mental health care here as it is elsewhere in the US.
And yet, after what happened in Orlando yesterday, I’m angry. I am angry that we live in a country that has wholly abdicated the promise of freedom upon which it was founded. We are no longer free from tyranny and fear, you and I.
As a part-time first responder who is interested in emergency management, disaster recovery, and safety in general, I read pretty much everything related to those topics that I can get my hands on, including a lot of stuff about how people respond in a crisis. It’s fascinating stuff, and some really excellent books have been written about it, such as Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why.
A side effect of this is that I have started paying attention to what I would call “unusual” deaths and accidents. People keep doing things that I would consider to be pretty damn unsafe, and it costs them. Recent examples are plenty. A man leaves the designated paths at Yellowstone, and falls into a spring that is so high-temperature and acidic that there is literally no body to recover. A young man accidentally shoots himself while taking a selfie with a pistol. A tourist in Australia goes swimming at 10 at night in an area clearly marked with signs warning about crocodiles and gets killed by a crocodile over 14 feet long. Or the guy in Georgia back in March who decided that it would be cool to pack an old lawnmower with 3 pounds of Tannerite and then shoot at it from only 40 feet away. He blew off his own leg, and the whole thing was caught on video.
And I realized that what all of these people had in common was this: a lack of fear. Specifically, a lack of what I would consider to be the healthy kind of fear.
Life is always a mixture of the bitter and the sweet, the dark and the light, the gratitude and grief. I admit that I often focus on the bitter parts to the exclusion of all else. That is in large part due to the fact that a large portion of my 20’s and almost all of my 30’s have been spent dealing with one crisis or another and, last year, dealing with death after death. That, and the way that people treat you, tends to color one’s outlook on the world a bit. Depression doesn’t help either.
That being said, this year is turning out to be one of the best in a long time. Despite losing Bucky last week, things seem to be looking up for us.
Today Geoff and I helped Bucky leave this world and move on to the next. He was 18 years old, and I will miss him every day.
Bucky and Scratch, this was as close as they got to cuddling.
Bucky was born on April 15, 1998. He was born before I graduated from college, in the last century, the last millennium, before Barack Obama became President, before I had my first cell phone, before I had even met Geoff, let alone married him. He was my first child, and he will always be special.
Bucky moved with me through seven different apartments in two cities, he outlived his younger brother Smoky, he tolerated two foster dachshund sisters, an untold amount of visiting dogs of varying breeds (Scarlett, Ivory, Fletcher, Pixie, Jasmine, the list goes on), living with a roommate who had a dog and a cat of her own*, and surviving a 1 1/2 story fall down an uncovered shaft and being pinned inside a wall in the middle of the night**.
Bucky in his less formal wear. In true lord of the manor style, he showed up for meals and when he needed personal grooming. Yep, he was totally an Earl.
Bucky was nearly imperturbable. He was loving and sweet with humans, but he suffered no crap from other animals. When I brought Smoky home from the shelter, at Bucky’s request mind you, and Smoky turned into an unholy terror, Bucky rolled his eyes and we hid in my loft bed and watched the destruction in amicable silence. When Bucky met Rerun he quickly established dominance with a sequence of three closed paw blows to Rerun’s snout that were over nearly before they’d begun. Rerun never forgot that encounter.
Bucky was also an athlete like no other cat I’ve met. In his prime he could jump from a sitting position to over six feet straight up into the air and land on a narrow (maybe 1 inch?) window frame. That moved. Then he’d make another flying leap up onto the next story of our interior courtyard and simply hop windowsill to windowsill and visit the upstairs neighbors. Some of them would leave the windows open so he could come inside and visit. As he was a stellar mouser and the building was, well, infested with mice, his presence was always welcome.
Privacy in the bathroom? Ha!
About a year and a half ago we had noticed that Bucky was starting to lose weight. I fully expected his blood work to come back saying that his kidneys were going. But they weren’t, turns out something was up in his digestive track. Eventually there was a tiny hardening in the area. We kept him on meds for a while, but finally he let us know on no uncertain terms that he just didn’t like the taste. So we switched to prednisolone. He was on it for the better part of 9 months. He was doing fine. The palpable thing in his belly, as of the first week of May, was small, smaller than a dime. He spent Brimfield at the vet’s and came back happy and shiny.
Don’t look up!
Then this week he pretty much stopped eating. And tonight he wouldn’t come when we called for dinner. We went looking for him and found him hiding where Smoky used to hide when he was scared or didn’t want to be pilled. As I’d barely been able to pill him this morning, we knew it was time. The vet graciously stayed open late for us, and we said our goodbyes. I know that he’s with Smoky and Rerun and all of the other furry kids that Geoff and I have had come in and out of our lives so far and I know I’ll see him again. I am at peace with the decision to let him go and I think that the timing was just right. But I will miss him. O Lord, will I miss him.
Bucky came to me from the MSPCA. He was a Phinney’s Friends cat. Phinney’s Friends was, at the time, a program at the MSPCA designed to help people with HIV/AIDS keep their pets while dealing with their disease. Bucky’s human had died and so he was up for adoption. I adopted him in 1999 and he was with me for the rest of his life.
Phinney’s Friends is now a standalone non-profit and it is entirely volunteer run. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to make a donation there in Bucky’s memory or in the memory of a person or animal you love. Without them he never would have come into my life and I would have been all the poorer for it. Also, Phinney’s Friends now has an expanded mission that, especially with the way the economy has been, is more important than ever.
Now cracks a noble heart.—Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
~Kelly
* Bucky got his nickname “Bruiser” while living with that roommate. He got in a spat with her cat over some of her cat’s wet food and bit her cat’s tail. The end of that cat’s tail later fell off. In her owner’s bed. Whoops.
** This is a super long story but I will tell you sometime if you want to hear it. Just not now.
The Books are Taking Over... 