Motive and Opportunity

I’m sitting in the car waiting for my grandson.  Moments ago, I read a post by Grant Faulkner, who in 2016 was the Executive Director at National Novel Writing Month.

“I’ve been remembering the 2016 election this week,” he wrote.

Normally, he said, November draws thousands of writers; however, after Trump’s election in 2016, writers’ stories literally collapsed.

It wasn’t just the NaNoWriMo writers. (Writers who commit to write 50,000 words for a novel in 30 days.) Many of his friends and professional writers stopped writing.

They were traumatized.

Faulkner said before that November, he didn’t believe in writer’s block, but then he saw that writing is difficult and sometimes impossible for a battered brain.

Trauma and depression can turn off the spigot of creativity.

 

“It’s easy to think that our art is trivial when it’s up against such a menacing and malevolent block of history as we’re living through, but the opposite is actually true: our art isn’t trivial; it’s what can deliver us.”

 

Faulkner said that James Baldwin (Go Tell it on the Mountain 1953, Notes of a Native Son, 1955) expressed the importance of the role of the artist better than he could:

 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

 

Howard Zinn’s quote, “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian,” provided Faulkner with hope because we need to see that “compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness” are a part of every era.

 

Don’t let them destroy your connection to life and the joy of living. Appreciate the world we live in and the fantastic beauty surrounding us.

I look up from behind the steering wheel and notice that the great flock of Canadian Geese I admired before settling into this page have dwindled to about 25.

The 25 are scattered about the grass, their white breasts glowing like snow patches left after the bulk of snow has been absorbed into the ground. Some are preening, and occasionally, one—male or female, I can’t tell the difference –will spread their wings in a morning wake-up stretch, revealing dark feathers beneath.

(Like some of us, some geese are slower to wake up or are simply basking in the glory of the day before getting to work.)

The day is overcast. As am I.

As I reflect, I wonder how many of us who lived through the Second World War are alive today. Do they despair that the U.S., the land of the free, the home of the brave, has opened its doors to Tyranny?

 I don’t know.

 

Monty Python:

“Oh, king, eh? Very nice. And how’d you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.”

--Dennis (Michael Palin)

 

I went to sleep last night more hopeful than days earlier. I wondered if somebody had thrown a monkey wrench in our electoral process.

Could it be that the numbers are off? Could more than 50% of the voting population see the danger of what just happened with the Presidential election?

Motive and Opportunity?

Do you have questions regarding the outcome of the election??

Oh, I know, Trump got the 270 electoral votes that declared him a winner. Harris conceded. It was over just like that.

The losers were standing around, going, “Huh?”

No one stormed the Capital. No hangman nooses hung from platforms. No one was clubbed to death. Harris promised a peaceful transfer of power. No one was yelling that the election had been stolen from them. No person clutched the white house carpet like a feral cat we were trying to extract from its cage.

That was quick and easy.  Sap, it was over.

But wait!  Were we really that wrong? Did we so believe in the goodness of humanity that we ignored the fact that a man running for the Presidency once kept speeches of Hitler on his bedside table? Did we forget that the President-elect once said he wanted his General to be like Hitler’s Generals?

 

See, people don’t remember WWII.

You might say I’m stupid or ignorant but look at it.

Number one: Trump faces criminal charges which, if elected, he can pardon.

Number Two: One of the wealthiest men in the world, who gave one person per week a million dollars to persuade them to register—no tampering with the election- he didn’t tell them how to vote. This person fired his workers because they went on strike. This person said the “Alpha Males” should run the country.

 “Musk, who has a history of sparring with regulators, also faces government investigations into his companies that could result in more lawsuits or even criminal prosecutions.”—Bloomberg News

“Bloomberg has identified more than half a dozen ongoing legal fights in which Musk is a defendant or a plaintiff, as well as about a dozen others involving his companies.”

Before the election, Elon Musk said, “If Trump doesn’t win, I’m F*****.”

After the election, he made 60 million dollars.

(“Tesla headed for a $2 trillion valuation after Musk’s ‘big bet’ on a Trump win.” Analysts say.") –story by Breck Dumas.

 

Follow the money, say the lawyers.

Motive and Opportunity? ask the courts.

Indeed, we have motive. Do we have opportunity?

I don’t know.

“Elon Musk said his satellite internet venture Starlink now has more than 1,500 active satellites in orbit above Earth.” –story by Kellen Beck

Could any of those satellites interfere with the ballots and their outcome?

Does anyone know?

Does anyone else smell what I smell?

Hey, there are good rats too, my kids had one.

P.S. Dear Readers,

We're getting close to the finish line in posting Chapters. So much has happened since we began this journey together. Probably if I wrote this book now it would be different, but that's the way life works. We're here now, and the next instant there is a new NOW. I see on the last page of this book that I completed in on April 29, 2024. It has 59 Chapters, 55,989 words.

Thank you for all who have read my story where I was also encouraging you to write yours.

To continue reading go to

https://www.wishonwhitehorses.com/p/your-story-matters-living-your-life-in.html

Hope

 

The first egg is always a monumental event.

After a winter of rest, sleep, and using her energy to grow new feathers, one of my chickens laid her first spring egg. I could name her Hope, but I have three red hens, and I can't tell them apart, so I don't know who laid the egg. That egg was from yesterday. Today, I got another. Yea!

 

 ----Imagine strips of paper upon which you have written your insights. 

You throw them up into the wind. And other people, like children running through their first flurry of snow, arms outstretched, instead of catching snowflakes on their tongues, catch those paper strips in their tiny little fists. If they like what's written on the strip, they keep it. If not, they throw it back into the wind to be picked up by someone else.

 

On a day long ago, there were murmurings at the kitchen table that were not understandable to little ears, but I knew something was brewing. My father enlisted in the Navy because he knew the draft was coming and wanted to choose his area of service. The Navy was not to be, though, for they found he was color blind. Therefore, he ended up in the Army. I learned of my father's colorblindness from those murmurings and how that surprised him. Maybe that's why he sketched in pencil or charcoal, a.k.a. black and white. I learned that during the war, he drew portraits for the soldiers, and I remember he said, "You can't put too many lines on a face."

 

Once, he wrote, "You thought I would only be gone for a short time, didn't you?" I don't remember knowing he was going to be gone. If there were any goodbyes, I don't know them. If there were any tears, I didn't see any. He was just gone. He must have slipped out when I was sleeping.

He survived the war, but not his marriage or his fatherhood with me.

Which brings me to a question:

If the civilians on the home front could watch their brothers, husbands, and sons go off to a foreign land not knowing if they would ever see them again, if they were willing to offer their pots and pans as metal for the war effort, if they could have necessary items, like shoes and foodstuffs rationed, and purchase war bonds to help fund the war effort and still maintain HOPE for a liberated future, we can do it.  

 

Those folks back home believed that goodness would prevail and that evil would be vanquished.

Do we believe that now?

Without hope, if we feel that the future will not be better than the present and might even be worse, we will die spiritually.

We have it backward. The opposite of happiness is not sadness. It's hopelessness.

Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. So, why not shoot up a school, sleep with your boss's wife, take illicit drugs, or load up on pharmaceuticals by the bucketfuls?

 

 ----My strips of paper blowing in the wind will contain plain talk about magical things. I am gathering them into a book with the working title of YOUR STORY MATTERS, Living Your Life in the Most Awesome Way Possible.

 I metaphysically use the word magic. I know physics is at work. I also understand that something divine is swirling around that we find impossible to explain. 

 "I may not get there with you," said Martin Luther King Jr., "but I have been to the mountain. Mine eyes have seen the glory…I know that we will get to the promised land." 

He gave that speech on April 3, 1968. On April 4, 1968, he was shot and killed.

There was a man with a vision, a man who believed in non-violent resistance, and a man who had hope. He made a difference.

I know we are made of strong stuff. We must find our courage, integrity, and ingenuity and gather harmoniously. Remember, we are the ones to make a brighter day.

 Once, I watched a T.V. show where the presenter traveled the world looking for the happiest people. He found that the Taiwanese were among the happiest. The reason? 

They believed in hope.

 

 I was poking around in an old website that sat unpublished since 2015.

 

It was my old Blog, Where Tiger’s Belch and Monkey’s Howl.

Now when reading it it seemed happy.

 

Why did I let it go? When I read the  post,“What Makes You Happy?” and came across “Puppy Love,” I was hooked. It has a link to a Budweiser Clydesdale commercial that made me cry/laugh/smile. 

 

I am reopening the Where Tiger’s Belch Blog. I trust that the Universe is guiding me in the right direction.

 

When I read, “Have you noticed that it takes more effort these days to hold up your face?” I had to laugh.

 

Maybe you are much younger than me and haven’t discovered the face issue yet. Perhaps it’s just me. I look at myself in the mirror and don’t look too bad, but when I see a photo of myself, I wonder what happened.

 

Well, I discovered the truth. In the mirror, I inadvertently held up my face, and a photograph caught me slack jawed. 

 

One writer asked, “How does your writing look at its relaxed state? Do you let it drop like our face?”

 

See, someone else knew of this phenomenon. Oh, the pressure to hold up your face and your writing.

 

From Norm Papernick on Tigers:

 

 “Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.”

 

I was more light-hearted then—I’m returning to that blog.

 

Please give Where Tigers Belch a look- see. I would appreciate your thoughts on it. I will clean up some posts, delete some, and check my grammar and spelling. It could be like a high school play that is not perfect; it is not slick or professional, but it has the heart that professional Hollywood plays do not have.

 

It is fresh.

 

Here it is at https://wheretigersbelchandmonkeyshowl.blogspot.com

 

Soon, it will be www.wheretigersbelchandmonkeyshowl.com. I wanted simply wheretigersbelch.com, but alas, someone else got it. It’s “coming soon.” Please don’t confuse it with mine.