Watching a trainwreck

I got an email from Robert Reich last night, subject line, “I’m Terrified” and that made me think, “you know I kind of am, too”. By the current crisis, or politics, or whatever the hell is happening our country right now.

So much scary and infuriating stuff this week, starting with Jacob Blake, then three people shot in Kenosha, two of them died, trying to take the gun away from the 17-year old who did the shooting. Peaceful protests, and riots, and destruction, in Kenosha and here in Madison, and all over the country. Another man killed in Portland Saturday night, and probably more we’re not hearing about. People arrested for no good reason. The RNC, with Trump using the White House as his political platform reminding me of nothing so much as Hitler.

And I keep hearing Trump supporters on NPR, who at first sounded reasonable, but then fell off the deep end. Like the Latina married to a white man, in Arizona, who started with All Lives Matter, and then said that her middle school daughter is losing friends at school for not supporting Black Lives Matter, and “that organization, well we just don’t know, what George Floyd did.” Come on lady, innocent till proven guilty – and NO ONE deserves to be summarily executed, without trial, without explanation – to die under a knee like that. There were some Young Republicans the other day who were worse, one of them saying that the speakers at RNC, including Trump, laid out solid economic policy, and they kept talking about “criminal justice reform” which pretty clearly meant locking up people they’re afraid of. And the one with a kid who said she was voting for Trump as the education candidate, because our kids would get practical education for jobs, not from books.

So I dunno, I’d much rather write about food, maybe I’ll add that later. For the featured image, I’ve brought back a botanical drawing of watermelon that I first posted in 2016, from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, that reminds me of this recent pic of my own.