I’m heading out on my morning walk. Kind of a late start, 7:45 a.m. I’m following the route I used to take to work. ‘Tis really a joy not having any anxiety about what time I will get in. The lack of that pressure makes this walk today a great deal more pleasurable.
I feel rested as I start out on this path. The temperature last night dropped into the 50sF. it was the kind of sleeping weather where you could just hunker down with a bit of blanket and feel comfortable. Lying there in the cool quiet night there were no weird dreams, no restlessness due to heat or humidity. I just slept like a rock. It felt really, really good.
Coming up on the first hill of the walk. Feels good I have my legs pumping and my arms swinging. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, there are a bazillion plants in bloom. We Michiganders love our plants. I debated whether I should go back and change the last sentence and say flowering plants. However, we here in the Great Lakes State are fans of all kinds of greenery, not just the showy flowers.
I listened to my favorite podcasts before I set out this morning. I ended up cogitating on the word cratered. In the course of two different podcast I heard the word applied to the financial markets yesterday (down over 5% 1,800 points) and as to the approval ratings of a politician who had recently spewed something vile.
I understood what they were trying to communicate, that being that the approval rate or that the level of activity had taken such a dive as to be analogous to an object falling from a great distance and then striking the earth’s hard surface thus leaving a crater. Prior to the last month I really haven’t heard this word in so frequent a level of usage. Is there some kind of buy monthly flyer that goes out to broadcasters which says use these words in your headlines this month? I mean a few months ago the buzzword was woke. Maybe cratered is among the approved words to be using. Language is fun. It is always shifting. I had to look up the popular distinction between Karen’s and Becky’s yesterday.
While we are on language as I predicted people are changing to divert our focus from the cooccurring problems of police brutality and systemic racism in America. There are people who are just shunting aside the Black Lives Matter narrative and focusing on the Defund the Police tagline. In essence they are saying we will put a pin in the racism problem and come back to it. Yeah, no. We have done that too many times before.
What is being done is that a certain group is ignoring the need to address racism and they are twisting the narrative relative to American policing. They are attempting to move the focus on the police from a concept that would imply removing the broad ranging, and in many cases unwarranted, officer immunity and offloading a variety of functions to social workers to one summed up in this tagline, If you are against funding the police then you are in favor of enabling and emboldening criminals. Nayh.
Nobody wants police to disappear. What we clearly want are trained officers to respond when someone has broken into our home with a weapon. But we also want to end the macho and insensitive treatment of people who don’t look like those people who populate law enforcement’s ranks. Just because we don’t want the police to be surveilling us 24/7 with Amazon and IBM software and categorizing us and potential perpetrators of future crime, doesn’t mean that we don’t want well trained men and women maintaining order and protecting all our lives and property.
Moving from the status quo is hard. But the tact of demonizing those who want change, change that is needed, isn’t helpful except for a very cynical group of people trying to consolidate political power. Just because we want change in a system of policing that recent events have shown has unnecessarily violent tendencies and racist underpinning, does not mean we want evildoers controlling our streets. This is not an either/or situation. We want change that is beneficial to our society as a whole and to the black population of America in specific.
Oh yeah, Covid 19 is spiking again.
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