These are things that have been rattling around in my head since the horror began to reveal itself last night. Some of them are fully formed letters, other are just too long to be tweets. Read them, share them, do what you will (with credit of course). Fair warning, I don’t have the tolerance or patience to argue with Trump supporters, anyone who opted out of voting yesterday or who voted 3rd party. If you show up here spouting crap that in any way irritates or stresses me I’ll bring down the ban hammer so fast it won’t just be the door hitting you in the ass on the way out.
Oh, yeah, and I’m probably gonna break my own rules and swear. It’s the apocalypse. I think my mom will understand.
Yes, historic. No, I am not being overly dramatic.
I have plenty to say, but as an introduction I want all of you to hear what Samantha Bee has to say because she puts it in its proper perspective and frankly, it’s something I think we all need to hear.
She’s right. As Kelly pointed out on our Twitter feed earlier today, a lot of people (particularly women) see this election in its proper context as (quite probably*) the first election of a woman to the office of President of the United States. And that is absolutely HUGE.
More to follow soon, I promise.
-Geoff
*Unless this turns into another too-close-to-call nail biter like 2000, we’ll probably know soon enough, won’t we?
In the time since our last posts, so much has happened in our lives, and in the greater world, and in the world of GoT, that it feels truly overwhelming. I can’t keep up with it all. If I was to try to describe everything in great detail, it would take multiple posts of extraordinary length. And right now I don’t have the time or the energy.
I am just going to try to summarize everything with just one one post. At least for now.
Before I start talking about this particular Park Service ranger, I wanted to put it in context of my own relationship with the Park Service. I have been a fan of the Park Service for a very, very long time, at least since I was a boy. And for about a decade in my twenties and early thirties I was a volunteer for them at Stones River National Battlefield (in fact, you can occasionally still see a photo of me in my Union Army Civil War uniform in old park literature) in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Occasionally I also did programs at other Civil War battlefields and sites. I miss it, frankly. Perhaps one day I will be in a position to do that sort of volunteer work again.
Anyway, I still read a lot about things going on with the Park Service and I generally try to keep up with things going on with NPS. Like any organization, NPS has its celebrities. I had the privilege of meeting one of them, Civil War historian Ed Bearss, now retired, on several occasions. Ed is a warm, funny, extremely intelligent and knowledgeable guy with an incredible work ethic. And in that regard I am reminded of him by Betty Reid Soskin, another NPS celebrity. Betty is an extraordinary woman who also happens to be the oldest serving U.S. Park Service Ranger. She currently works at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Park in Richmond, California. In fact, Betty was absolutely instrumental in the creation of that historic park. And since she herself lived through the events preserved at the site, she has her own unique and fascinating stories to tell about that time in our history, including what it was like to be a woman of color in that segregated era.
US Park Service Ranger Betty Reid Soskin (photo by Justin Sullivan via NPR)
Last year she lit the National Christmas Tree and got to meet President Barack Obama, who gave her a special commemorative coin as a souvenir and gift. At the ceremony, she carried a photograph of her great-grandmother, who was born a slave in 1846 and died in 1948 at the age of 102. She carried the same photograph in her pocket in 2009, when she witnessed President Obama’s inauguration.
Well, something terrible happened to her this past Monday. She was beaten and robbed in her own home there in Richmond. And one of the things the a**hole thief took from her was the coin the President gave her.
What kind of person does that? Who attacks a 94-year-old woman? How utterly depraved and/or desperate do you have to be to do that? God, I hope the police catch whoever did this to her. And the President has already said that he will replace the coin.
Luckily, she seems to be recovering. But if you want to help her, the Rosie the Riveter Trust has organized a fund to help Betty out with her expenses while she recovers. And being the awesome person she is, Betty has already said that any excess funds will be used for a special documentary film history project about her life.
Glad you are still with us, Betty, and from the East Coast, we all wish you the very best and hope you get well soon. We love you.
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.
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.
You know, I was having a conversation with Kelly the other day about everything going on in Meereen with Daenerys gone, and I came to a realization about some things.
It was April 27th, 1865 – 151 years ago today. And I bet that most people have never even heard of it, even though it killed more people than the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 or the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915.
I found another good video on YouTube about rogue waves, and this one actually talks at length about the dangers to offshore platforms and people on shore from rogue waves, using actual recent historical examples.
