The 2016 Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is POST-TRUTH: post-truth adjective. Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. I love words, I love dictionaries and this is the first time – that I can remember, at least – that I haven’t even heard the word before it became officially enshrined in our language. I think I prefer “selfie” from 2013 or even “
” from last year.
As a sort of prolog aside, my last blog post was on August 31st, over three months ago. For about 30 days before that, I kept starting blog posts only to realize I had already said what I wanted to say, or rant about, or whine about. Usually, several times. I began to feel like I had told all my stories and made all my comments. It is the feeling I get when Michele stops a story with “Yea, I know,” or “I’ve heard that story,” or – worst of all – corrects the story’s details. Even though this is the most singular election I can remember, it seemed like I had run out of things to say (or somebody else had already said them). It seems that writing about Trump would have made it easier but, with everybody talking about Trump all day, every day, it just didn’t seem like I had anything new. I also felt completely out of step in the facebook-verse with all my facebook friends who were sure that Trump had no chance of winning, posting things like Five ways Trump’s followers are stupid and Twenty things that make Hillary the most qualified candidate ever, when I wanted to post Holly shit, did you see the Republican debates? This guy is good, he destroyed the other Republican candidates and some of them are better campaigners than Hillary. End aside.
The press takes Trump literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. Some wag, now unknown to me, a couple of weeks ago.
To start with the bottom line, we need a woman president and the world needs for us to have a woman president. Really. We need new ideas, new thinking, we need a more egalitarian society, and more coöperation, we need more feminine energy if the world, as we know it, is going to survive . We need somebody in tune with our long-term survival, like a strict but nurturing mother. I’m not sure that Hillary Clinton would have been that mother but I am sure that Trump, a self-identified world-class Alpha Male, is not.
But he is going to be our next president and I am just now coming out of the disbelief stage. A friend came over for dinner a couple of days ago and he said that he isn’t reading or listening to anything on the election for the next three months because right now we are either in the I told you stage as in some variation of I told you that Hillary couldn’t beat Trump or the denial/anger stage as in some variation of I can’t believe that many people are so stupid to vote for Trump. It is probably good advice and I am sure I won’t take it.
Gratuitous picture of Granddaughter Charlotte
“Nobody has spread hate more ten Obama he has set race relations back 50 years.” a facebook post
Coming back to the news, my email queue, and facebook, after being gone for two weeks, has been a shock. Not that anything is any different than when I left, it’s just that I had been away from it. I pretty much only used my phone as a paperweight and alarm clock while we were gone and it separated me from the normalcy of violence in my daily life. 
A coup in Turkey, a mass killing in Germany, another black man killed by another scared- shitless cop in any city USA, fill the papers. Entreaties for more money because a judge has jailed a black lawyer for wearing the wrong pin, or because Trump has said something particularly nasty, clog my email in-basket. And then there is facebook, sucking me into arguments that seem like arguments on morality when they are really only different opinions. I don’t want to say that the sun going down over the Grand Canyon is better than arguing over Hillary hiring Wasserman, it isn’t; but it is more soothing and it is more connected to the Mystery.
Michele fractured her sacrum last December – or, more accurately, some other person fractured her sacrum by running into her on Mogul Hill while they were skiing at Squaw Valley – so we designed our trip around short jumps from city to city. Because we were visiting my sister in Albuquerque, the short jumps were really long painful rides broken up as much as possible. Now that we are back home and are catching up with the news, it seemed like a great time to be away and out of touch. Still, it’s great to be home.
…to go see my sister and random points west.