Remnants of the Road Trip: Coming Home

While we made the drive out to Texas in two days, we broke up the home trip into three days.

Heading there, we took I-15 to Barstow, on the way to Vegas, and then took I-40 the rest of the way to Amarillo, where we pick up US-287 towards Ft. Worth. Clarendon is about an hour down 287. The Farm is on County Road W, down TX-1260, eight miles from the center of Clarendon.

Anyway...

When we left, we went down to the next Co. Rd., X, and headed west to TX-70. This took us through the beautiful canyon country. We eventually picked up the bigger TX-87, and that took us all the way to New Mexico, where it merged with US-60. We had made plans to stop in Roswell, to help Cass maybe form some real memories from this trip: let's go see where some people think aliens crashed one of their flying saucers. You know, kitschy shit.

US-60 got us to Clovis, where we switched over to US-70, and made it to Roswell by the early afternoon.

We were looking for kitschy gifts for one of Cass's friends---stuff you can only really get from roadside attractions---and eventually found something called Space Walk. For five bucks, Cass and I walked through an amusement maze, a veritable haunted house for UFO stuff. The guy let us go through as much as we wanted, and after some initial reservations, Cass was running through near the end. We picked up some alien-themed gifts and left, but not before Cass and I had blown through the maze five times.

We followed US-70 all the way to Las Cruces, in new Mexico. The plan had been different, but fires in moutinous regions of Arizona had prompted the change in plans. After crazy downpours and tiny rock slides, I blew a tire about 80 miles away from Las Cruces.

I rode the donut the rest of the way, and the next morning, day two of the drive home, we replaced the brand new tire (no warranty since road hazards are not covered) with another brand new tire and headed out.

We picked up I-10 in Las Cruces and went all the way to Phenix, where we'd planned to see both my mom and Grandma Lorraine. Along the way we decided to break up the trip with breaks so Cass could get out and move around, but also to see some of the weird shit that's everywhere along highways like this.

In New Mexico, we started seeing billboards for "The Thing?"

After about fifty of these, for hundreds of miles, by the time we saw the actual exit, it was decided that we MUST stop and see what the fuss was all about.

We bought our tickets for the "museum" (ten bucks for the 'family' deal), and entered a room. There was a photo-op, and I thought we'd been bilked for ten bucks, because I thought that this was all there was to be:

And as cool as an alien riding a dinosaur is, ten bucks seems steep for the picture. It turns out there was more. So much more...

The "Thing" itself was found at the end of the museum walk, and it was the contention of the proprietors that the Thing was proof of their historical conceit:

If you don't want to enlarge that picture and read it through, the idea is that two warring factions of aliens have been fighting over parts of earth for millions of years. One faction enslaved dinosaurs with advanced technology, another wanted to peacefully coexist. Which faction do you think they believe helped the Nazis? Which faction was on the side of the US during the Revolution? And versus the Nazis?

My question was: was it the same peaceful faction of aliens that're our allies that helped keep systemic racism in tact for all these years?

There were a lot of artifacts---cars, farm equipment, carriages---and a ton of money was dumped into the production values of the placards disseminating the literature of the theory. I mean, check out a random display:

By the time they show the Thing, after the provenance is, er, established (found by copper miners in the early years of the twentieth century), the threads of how it is supposed to be evidence for their battling-alien-factions theory are mostly lost.

Anyway, here it is:

Now, I've seen a few episodes of Bones, and I can say that while not an expert in forensic anthropology, I'd guess that this is a sand-induced mummy of a lady and her child, maybe not more than a thousand years old.

Why can't that be cool enough? Why did I think I was in a Scientology museum for the majority of the walk through? I don't think that part was necessary, but LOTS os creative energy went into the museum, and I can appreciate that.

We eventually made it to the hotel near my mom in Scottsdale, saw her for take-out dinner, and went swimming before passing out. Day two of driving home, Day Ten of being away from Long Beach, was done.

The next day our visit with Grandma Lorraine was scratched because she felt ill. Elder care facilities are all on lock down in the Phoenix area, and while we contemplated our visit (Camille had a slight fever and Cass had a phlemy cough), Lorraine made our decision for us.

By this day, we were ready to be home. Instead of two, nine or ten hour days driving, we went with three seven hour days (give or take).

This kind of experience is nearly impossible to summarize in words like this. Maybe I'm too tired or stricken by cabin fever to do it justice. Maybe the magic of a trip to the Harrison Farm is too much. Maybe the first road trip with our whole family is a certain kind of special.

Maybe its all of those things. And more.

Well...we have another one of these planned, up to the Cabin in July, so that's pretty rad. Round 2, in a few weeks.

Six Days of Magic: The Farm

Once an operational diary and cotton farm, Corrie's family's Farm is now a relaxation getaway. It has been in Corrie's family since the land was first developed, in the mid-nineteenth century, if I'm not mistaken (I may be fully mistaken).

Grandma June,whom I've written about before, was born and raised on the Farm, and Ron spent much of his young life and teenage years there. Corrie and all of her close cousins, many growing up in Austin, would make the trek each summer for an extended family trip.

Like with my family's Cabin, we've tried to do something similar: make it a place that grows in our kids' imagination, a place that's theirs as much as ours.

There's space to roam, there're tractors to drive, there's work to be done. It really is a wonderful diversion for city-folk like us.

At this point, I lean towards pictures really only explaining it...

I think Corrie's eyes are shut in the following picture, but the smiles come easily once you've arrived:

Oh yeah, the hammock district, down on 3rd:

The Big Barn, with Ron's newly added pottery studio, is a great place to watch storms roll by fifty miles out, have an auction or two, perform the talent show sketches---during the reunions---or muster for target practice:

Tractor time for the city-boy, Cassius:

Other cool memories for kids: riding in the back of an open trailer:

Father's Day and our anniversary were the same day this year, and while I hadn't showered in a while, a father's day photo-op was in the cards:

Laundry drying the old fashioned way: using the windy-as-hell environs:

That was not an easy accomplishment, putting sheets up in that kind of wind, let me tell you.

Other places to explore, the South Forty, as they're called (as in the "southern forty acres") shows the rolling prairie land that makes up the edge of the Texan canyon country, a beautiful place only a mile away to the west:

There are two working tractors and a riding lawn mower, and in the old junk yard, you can still find the remnants of farm equipment: old cotton gins and even a tractor or two:

One of the only visible neighbors, a farmhouse a few miles away on a ridge, shows the beauty and remoteness of everything:

Time dilates and the world turns dreamlike. Lighting storms pass by in the distance bringing amazing shows. Other nights it passes overhead, making a show for someone further away, as the rain pours down in enormous sheets and thunder rattles everything. Hanging doors at midnight, hanging swamp coolers at midday. Wasps and hornets everywhere...grasshoppers bouncing away by the dozen with every step.

The reunion had been canceled, and Corrie decided, months ago, that we needed to get the hell out of LA for a while, and planned this trip. She wasn't sure who she wanted to notify, but since Ron basically lives there, he needed to know. News like that couldn't be kept under wraps, and most everyone of Corrie's immediate family made the trip to see us and meet Camille.

We got a few days alone with Ron before the madness, before the brisket and the weekend, and then a single day afterward, after everyone except Ron left and before we started our trek home.

Words can't express the serenity that the Farm provides.

One night, sitting on the covered front porch (on the right below) watching a lighting storm to the north, we watched a large barn owl perched on the thirty-foot tall post below on the left repeatedly swoop down, nab a mouse, mole, or gopher, and return to the post. Just another amazing thing to see while at the Farm:

Burls and Batting: Family Road Trip, Part 1

We returned a few days ago from our first four-top road trip to the Farm in Clarendon, Texas, an hour southeast of Amarillo, in the panhandle region.

Driving with a four year old and a four month old was not as bad as pop-culture would have you believe. It helps that Cass is rather mature (sometimes and somehow) and Camille is very chill.

Anyway...here's a breakdown of the drive, in map form:

We drove the northern route to Texas, and the southern route back.

Corrie had a trip to Anaheim that was supposed to be over quickly, but took until nearly 1 pm, which changed our scenic route plans to a more direct, high-speed chase of the horizon.

The first night, instead of stopping in Flagstaff after a day playing at Lake Havasu, we powered through 90 more miles to Holbrook, in Northern Arizona.

On Day Two of driving ,we stopped in Albuquerque to have lunch with one of my dad's brothers, Uncle Matt, oddly the only one of my dad's nine siblings Corrie had yet to meet in our nearly twenty years of being together, before keeping on for points east.

Corrie's dad, Ron, has been intermittently living on the Farm, and texted us as we got close to pick up beer before arriving, but we hit Amarillo at 9 pm (having lost two hours to time zones)(and traveling with kids, of course), and were out of luck due to pandemic-mandated closing times.

In the past, I may have made a bunch of posts about a trip like this, but I don't have the inclination now.

The Farm is a magical place where stress dissolves away within moments of arriving, and staring off at the prairie as storms roll by, or just chilling in the shade, is more entertaining than many, and most, things.

The first day was better than the second in the car, but even that wasn't so bad. Nineteen hours or so, over two days, surprisingly chill. No bathroom accidents, which was a concern of young parents. (Note: while I wouldn't qualify Corrie and I as young, per se, the kids are, as as such, we're still in early stages of parenting.)

Cass, also, didn't spend the majority of the time on the tablet, which I'm very proud of. He did spend some time on it, just not the majority of time.

Burls

I learned a few things on this trip, and I liked the way they sounded together in my head when mulling over the title of this trio of posts about our road trip. 

The first thing is a burl. When the bark of trees grows irregularly and turns knobby, that's a burl:

There was a nice burl on one of the trees where a hammock was set up, and Ron joked that we were waiting for it to get bigger before cutting them off and making things with the burled wood, since it looks very nice.

Batting

Another thing I learned about was batting. I helped Ron change the bats on the swamp cooler. When he first mentioned it, I thought he was talking about batteries because I'm an ignorant city-boy.

Batting is a shredded product that is wedged like insulation inside a swamp cooler. When it's old and terrible, it must be replaced, and that was one of the jobs we needed to do while on this trip. 

The old batting was an absolute nightmare. It was dirty and cancerous to breathe (I'm sure). The new stuff looked so much more normal, but still a terrible environmental product. It looks like the shredded stuff is actually wood, instead of a totally industrial product:

It's brittle and crunchy, and working with it makes one appreciate the manual labors and working with your hands.

We even installed the swamp cooler, which makes you feel like a helpful person, a helpful member of the team.

In any case, we made it safely to the Farm, our first week-long respite from the cramped city life we normally live through.

Overly Successful Invaders

Far from their natural habitat, two species of animal are wreaking havoc on environments that have no natural defenses, and the results have been devastating. In a cruel twist, each of the animals has a name that is both cool and simple.

Fire Ants

Originally from the Amazon, these ants caught a ride in South American ballast holds and once dumped, used their amazing ability to form colony-sized rafts and floated onto the American shores in Mobile Alabama.

Capable of producing nine million new ants a day, colonies tend to balloon to forty-million and live in in enormous underground labyrinths that they excavate. The tunnels keep the ants insulated from both heat and cold, and stretch down to the water table, so the colonies are also resistant to drought.

Fire ants don't bite in the sense that they break the skin with a painful mandible-strike. Their mandibles are quite strong, but they use them to grip whatever it is they're going to attack, and then they use their stinger on the end of their abdomen. Since it doesn't detach, they can make multiple strikes, with each one delivering venom.

With no natural predators, fire ants have started their slow march away from Alabama towards points east, west, and north. They are essentially unstoppable. Scientists have been working on how to stop the invasion...and then gave that up for the possibly possible goal of controlling the numbers. In this they found a glimmer of hope.

It turns out there's a specie of parasitic fly that only preys of fire ants. The reason the ants can make a raft is because of a substance in their exoskeletons, and it is for this hard substance that these flies have developed weaponry. The fly attacks, lays a single egg in the thorax of the ant, the egg grows into a maggot, migrates to the ant's skull. It takes over the ant's brain, eventually releases an enzyme that decapitates the ant, then flies out of the downed skull.

Each fly has about 200 eggs. It looks like introducing these flies to colonies can bring down the numbers by something like 80 to 90%. That sounds great, but: 1) there are so many colonies of these invaders; and 2) it takes a concerted effort to introduce the fly, since they're not native to North America either.

If you, too, can hear Seymour Skinner inn your head saying, "Well that's the beauty of the plan: in the winter the gorillas just freeze to death," as the end result of new waves of introduced species, fear not apparently. It is assured that the flies only attack fire ants, mainly because, the thinking goes, the egg-delivery method specifically evolved to target the species of fire ants that developed that buoyancy exoskeleton substance.

Lion Fish

Originally from the Indo-Pacific swath of ocean, the beautiful and venomous lion fish were dumped off the coast of the eastern United States a few years back, as well as somewhere in the Mediterranean. The problem here is that 1) they are wildly voracious, and devastate local fish populations; and 2) they reproduce quickly and face no predation in the Atlantic nor the Caribbean, where they have arrived.

They destroy reefs by eating all the fish that keep the algae on the coral in check, and once the algae-eating fish are gone, the corals tend to get choked out.

In Honduras, an effort to teach sharks to eat them has met with mixed results. On the other side of the planet, both sharks and groupers prey on lion fish, but in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, the sharks and groupers there never had them to prey on throughout theur evolutionary history, and while neither seem to be bothered by their poisonous dorsal spines, they also don't seem too interested in eating them.

The last line of predator defense against the lion fish's total take-over of the reefs of the Caribbean and Carolina's, is, eh, us. Humans.

There is a concerted effort to raise awareness of the destruction wrought by this invader by way of eating them. By popularizing the said-to-be-delicious meat of the lion fish, some order is hoped to be returned to devastated reef systems. It's open season on lion fish. 

I can't stress that enough: IF YOU GO DIVING OFF THE SOUTH EASTERN US, OR IN THE CARIBBEAN, KILL AS MANY OF THESE AS YOU SEE. It's as easy as that.

Postscript: Clearing Urchin Barrens

Similar in the sense that unchecked population growth is devastating, but different in the sense that they're not invasive, sea urchins can leave eerie landscapes where kelp forests used to thrive:

A before an after picture of urchin barrens and a kelp forest. The time it takes to go from the top picture to the bottom picture is not long: less than a month, actually.

I was reminded of this topic for a postscript because of the tact that some marine scientists took to help bring the kelp forest back in one place off the coast down here in LA. The normal urchin predators had been few and far between in the urban coastal scene south of Santa Barbara, so a couple of guys went out with hammers and smashed open every single urchin they could find. It was a massacre. 

Since they're not fast swimmers like lion fish, it was a little more straightforward. In five days there was a noticeable difference; within ten days holdfasts were supporting growing kelp; within three weeks it was a healthy, if young, kelp forest; and by day 28 the urchin barren was a distant memory.

It helps that kelp can grow two to three feet a day.

Sometimes it feels like a terrible ideology can be an invasive specie, and eradication seems both wildly necessary and practically impossible. At least with an invisible and indifferent invader, time is on our side, but the future seems like it will depend on how we deal with a terrible ideology. 

Curfews and Quarantines

The day started off so promising...

1: At the Beach

On the last day of May in this bizarro-world year of 2020, we gathered up the kids, some beach towels, and our walking masks, and headed down to the beach. This was our second foray to the seaside since they were reopened last week.

Last week I learned my daughter takes to the sun more like me than her mom or brother, and this week I joined Cass frolicking in the water.

After what seemed like hours, but was more like 80 minutes, we decided to wrap it up and head towards home. We'd heard that restaurants had been given the green light to reopen, depending on them following a strict social distancing/mask/glove-or-sanitizer regimen.

We decided to see if the taco shop we probably went to for our last sit-down restaurant meal back in March was one of the brave places that was attempting to open. In the two-and-a-half months since we'd been on Safer-at-Home directives we'd patronized them; we went with the family style meat-by-the-pound style of ordering.

2. So Weird Precisely Because it was "Normal"

We arrived at the Long Beach Taco Company and took seats in the shade outside. We ordered tacos, beer, ceviche, and a quesadilla for the Boy. As we ate, the lone group on the patio, something strange happened.

And it was strange because it was so normal of a past life. Corrie and I have noticed over the years of our being together, that we somehow arrive at restaurants as the first wave of the rush. I have no idea how or why this happens. And because we've been together for nearly twenty years (!) and have plenty of restaurant dining experience, I can say that this bizarre phenomenon occurs more than regularly.

We show up at a slow or quiet dining room, and when we leave, it will be busy and starting to back the kitchen up.

And this happened Sunday. Groups started to trickle into the patio, and eventually it was full, or as full as it could safely be in this moment. Going inside to ask for some foil and the check showed that they'd started seating people inside.

It was almost like a regular weekend day. Obviously you couldn't wear a mask while you stuff stewed meat wrapped in housemade tortilla into your gob, or chug beer, so for a brief few minutes, life resembled what it had before the invisible and indifferent menace swooped down into our lives.

But, across the street, another story was happening, a story of a weary town that'd seen much in its life and knew a storm was coming.

As we ate we watched a muralist across the street painting a pair of faces moments away from kissing, lips poised and eyes shut. Very stylized and enormous on the wood, he was using only black and white paint, and applying it with rollers once he detailed out the eyes.

Painting on wood? I thought...and realized that the gaggle of folks over there at the glass-fronted shops across the street weren't all watching him, rather they were affixing the 1-inch thick sheets of plywood to the fronts of the stores, shielding the inside of the businesses. 

Up and down the north side of 1st St the boutique denim shop, the coffee shop, the BYOC (bring your own container) store, the boutique sneaker store...all boarding up like a hurricane was coming.

I looked at Corrie and said, "Boards?"

She said that the George Floyd protest was later in the day. They were probably just preparing. She'd mentioned before we left for the beach that at 3 pm the protest and rally in downtown Long Beach was to muster and commence, and I'd thought about attending and bringing Cassius along. It would be a good learning experience for him. 

I've been a part of many protests and marches, and even parades, and the need to board up store fronts never materialized. Maybe as far as I knew, anyway.

We left a full and busy taco shop and headed home. Our route had us skipping the Broadway/Linden intersection, and the crowds were starting arrive, heading west along 1st St and Broadway, a block north. They had protest signs and masks, and the vibe was catharsis mixed with cautious pangs of hope.

We cheered them along as we headed north along Elm and they streamed west, as the muster point was Broadway and Long Beach Blvd, a diagonal block away from us.

3. The Peaceful Part, 

But Some Things are Very Weird

I had to carry Cass home the last stretch of the way, which showed just how exhausted and sunblasted he was. Me too, I thought, and add in the high-powered beers I drank at the taco shop, and I figured I would make a solo trip to the protest, and even then, it wouldn't be for long.

I didn't need more sun.

The crowd looked smallish and in good spirits, but people were still coming:

In the middle of the intersection of LB Blvd and Broadway a person with a bullhorn bellowed about institutional racism and then start a call-and-response chant. It went like that for a while as the crowd slowly grew.

After a while I felt like my extended time in the sun was coming to an end, and I decided to go get some beer for the house and head home. Walking down Broadway towards the beer shop I've been visiting during the pandemic, as well as towards Vons, I caught glimpse of a scene we'd only slightly felt before:

Shuttered for the storm...

We were only chanting...I mean, we marched nearly 30 k deep in downtown LA during the STRIKE, and I never saw any boarding...

Most either had Black Lives Matters papers stapled to them or were spray-painted with messages to the same effect.

When I got to Vons, I could tell something was very awry:

The grocery store needs barricading?

As I moved back towards home, it looked like the group was going to start marching east along Broadway, so basically following my trek to find alcohol. I joined the march near the front. It soon became apparent that the crowd had gotten the wrong message, and four-fifths of the people had started marching the opposite way, towards Pine and the heart of downtown Long Beach.

At the intersection of Pine and Broadway there were more chants, angrier this time and directed at the cops chilling and keeping an eye on things.

Once I learned that Beachwood Brewery was also closed, I figured it was a sign. A phalanx of new people, an influx of protesters came in from points east, and I rejoined the efforts:

Someone walked through the crowd, a crowd where nearly everyone wore masks except when they took them off to smoke joints or blunts, shouting new directions: "Pine to Ocean! Down Pine to Ocean..."

Off the mob walked, moving about like an amoeba, as marching crowds tend to do. I jumped ship again at Pine and 1st, a block north of Ocean, and headed home. Surely this had been enough sun for me, and my feet were chapped and still sandy.

I was home for a few minutes when my phone, and Corrie's phone, started blowing up with what we know as the Amber Alert message:

Curfew? This had been a mostly pleasant demonstration. Some of the chants I now fully adhere to, like "Abolish Police!" That one seems fit. The time is now to reimagine peace keeping as a combination of social work, drug dependence counseling, and major crime unit investigations (like sex trafficking and corporate money laundering). 

Turns out I'd left a little early.

4. The Chaotic Part

Helicopters had been a presence at all stages of the protest and march, and we're generally more used to hearing helicopters under regular circumstances in our neighborhood, so the constant drone in the background during our late afternoon dinner making time wasn't necessarily a surprise.

The sirens, though, were a little weird. Roaring all over the place, getting closer to the apartment, getting further away, getting closer...they were all around and loud. That was...unusual, but not totally insane.

I saw a neighbor of mine as I walked with Camille and Cass ran around before dinner, out on our front walkway area. This dude looked stressed the-f out. I called out to him. He was shaking his head, saying, "These looters, man...the shops downstairs...man...just, be careful..." and he took off down the stairwell.

Looters. I figured something like that had happened. At this point I was unaware of how things had unfolded.

Back inside I mentioned to Corrie that the neighbor had seemed stressed about looters, to which Corrie reassured me that with the sprinkler system intact, we'd most likely not burn to death. 

FIRE? Not something I'd been thinking about. Until then, of course.

A few minutes later as I got some things ready for dinner, it sounded like someone was about to be killed on the street outside. I went to the back balcony to have a look-see, but the trees blocked my view. Eventually they came into view: one dude with a rod or a pipe was mostly surrounded by folks trying to shove him along, to shoo him away.

That's when I realized what I was looking at: one person was ready to start bashing in windows on the businesses in one of the buildings across the street, ready to start a looting frenzy, but the neighborhood people weren't having any of it.

After dinner getting the kids ready for bed, the sirens and helicopters were now unbearable and made conversation difficult. Cass made it down, and Corrie went upstairs to check on the Simpsons rerun that would air n broadcast Fox 11 (we're old-fashioned), I went with a groggy Camille back into the bedroom. 

More chaos was coming in from the street. When Corrie showed up I handed Cam to her and went out to the balcony to have a serious look-see, where I could crane over the railing facing the dying sunlight.

Down below was a group of people I recognized: shopkeepers from the building's shops, and the neighbor from before; they were all lined up holding bats and rods and pipes. Briskly walking and jogging up the street towards them, towards us, away from downtown were dudes. Bad dudes, dudes that looked like they were up to no good. They also had pipes and bats.

They were met with a healthy dose of Move-the-Fuck-Along, and along they went, dissolving into the neighborhood.

Corrie came in to put the nearly asleep baby down in the crib and I headed upstairs to check on the Simpsons. On Fox 11 at that exact moment was a cop, an LBPD sergeant talking right in front of the former Big 5 store at 4th and the City Place shopping promenade, maybe a thousand feet from the apartment. My neighborhood was on TV at that instant.

 A reporter was asking the cop, "How come rounding the looters up has proven so difficult?" And he looked around and said, "Well, they just dissolve into the neighborhood..." I just said that, I thought to myself.

To the west, north, and east of the City Place shopping center is residential neighborhood. To the south is more commercial, and eventually the Pike, which is where the group I had been walking with had been heading when I peeled away and went home.

I had literally seen the looters am-scraying into the woodwork.

Seeing your neighborhood on the news, or television in general, is always surreal. I found an article online that had been pretty recently updated, and it filled in some of the gaps for me, with information on the Pike destruction. Two things about the article:

1. It was written (partially) by my boy Ruben! Go Rubes!
2. It made me realize that had we not gone to the beach, Cass and I would most certainly have stuck with the march all the way to the Pike, and eventually I would have had to have grabbed him and ran when the windows started getting smashed.

Talking to Corrie later, I looked up and saw another surreal sight: the business where I get my prophylactics was on my television screen:

The helicopters and sirens drowned out whatever we put on, but we were trying to process the realities and weren't going to be able to focus on anything with any serious concentration.

It was after 1 am when the helicopters and sirens finally stopped sounding, and when that came about, it was cemetery silent. No cars, no bikes, no homeless people talking or arguing, no drunks loudly professing their love for banal things---total silence.

5. The Next Day

Some stores are still boarded up, and the grocery store's pandemic-limited hours are even more limited, as on Monday it was done letting people in around 12:30. Yesterday, Tuesday, Cass and I went shopping at 9 am.

Monday morning, on the way to daycare, I saw lots of people in masks carrying brooms, dustpans, and trash-bags. They were out en masse looking for places to clean up. The volunteerism was very high, and it leaves you with a sense that there is hope for this broken and failed nation.

Perspectives

I'm not one to proffer blanket condemnation of looters. Ii think this society s a little too consumerist anyway, and property can be replaced and/or fixed.

The annoying thing for me about it in this moment, and something that reinforces the idea that bricks were strategically planted to encourage the few who felt like busting stuff up, is that the looting hijacks the narrative that we as a country need to have a tough conversation about race, and specifically about the two separate worlds that are being policed by the same people.

To even acknowledge that that type of conversation needs to be had, we have to gather by the tens-of-thousands across the nation shouting at the top of our lungs. But the story the next day is about people liberating resources looting from their own neighborhoods. On and on it goes.

And the White House resident threatens to send the military to the city to "deal" with protesters of social injustice. Maybe we should all just show up at the capital with machine guns. 

That guy seems to think that's fine, right?

Oh wait, how's that pesky pandemic doing? Oh yeah...over 100 k dead and over 40 million out of work.

Stopped worrying about that for a second, didn't we?

JUSTICE FOR GEORGE FLOYD! JUSTICE FOR BRIONNA TAYLOR! HOW FAR AWAY ARE THE FIRES OF REVOLUTION?