When the fog shrouds...

          Our summer nights have been cozy, wrapped in fog.

      The spirited vapor rolls in from the coast as late evening sun and shadows play across the Santa Lucia slopes. As darkness descends, the fog rises from the valleys and thickens.

        I've taken it as a sedative. It's a shroud, buffering and insulating, changing the appearance of things. It helps take the edge off life's pain, if only temporally and if only in an illusory way.

        We live in a season of madness. We postulate extinction. My generation will not see the end of the whirlwinds we have given flight. Our friends are disappearing. We are no longer fleet. We are increasingly irrelevant. But we, some of us, rage against the insanity, the short sightedness, the decline, and demise.

        Those hard lines and sharp edges of life soften in the fog. 

        Fog may hide things, but we do not hide from life. 

        It seems a lifetime of reporting is calling in IOU's. I am now clobbered by war, disaster, broken hearts, frightening futures, wasted chances, toxic personality, and disappearing evidence of heart and soul. Like many of you, we worry about heirs and the yet unborn. And in every headline and news break is a connective nerve to the moments that soak the brains and hearts of old journalists in the pain, suffering, death, misdeeds and carnival of inhumanity that we saw and felt and can never seem to forget. It is our pass into club PTSD. Of course there are others here too, and some more grievously wounded. 

        The older I get the more resilient the ghosts are. The fog is a cocoon, but only a pretender.

        The Frontline Documentary Ukraine: Life Under Russia's Attack, left me depleted and ranting that a lethal drone should be addressed to Vladimir Putin. Another madman is loose in Europe, again. Why can't we learn from history? And already we are starting to forget. Old news, exactly what he counted on. 

        I had to step out for a walk, in the cool mist.

        It is life out of balance. Election deniers, a radical Supreme Court turning back the calendar on human rights, people tossed out of homes, working poor unable to get by, huge wealth getting larger, oil companies gouging for record profits, fires, floods, and human kind seems paralyzed. Where is the common sense? Where is decency?

        I sat in a briefing this week with a just retired Lt. General who had directed the Department of Defense's  Joint Center on Artificial Intelligence. You probably don't want to hear this, but the Chinese are way ahead of us in digital transformation, global interconnectivity and Artificial Intelligence. As he said the issues are Organization and Innovation. The question is How does an organized and innovative adversary fare on the battlefield?

        The US Military struggles mightily and lags in digital organization and innovation. Same old, same old. Turf battles, who's in control, yaddity, yaddity, yaddity.

        Once some of us were called "angry young men or women." Now we are angry again. As the saying goes, we know where the bodies are buried and we have secrets we will take with us. We've seen how we've missed getting it right, over and over.

       General's also talk about fog. They call it the fog of war, a confusion and lack of judgement caused by war. We are a people at war with our values, with each other, living on a planet that we are at war with.

        The great American writer Ben Hecht offers us wisdom; I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life's hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are."

            See you down the trail.

JUST CAUSE

STANDING UP TO HATRED

    It was a coincidence of human rights and history and it hit me with an emotional wallop.  
    We saw 42, the Jackie Robinson story and the next day saw a well staged production of the classic, Fiddler On The Roof.

    I don't need to dwell on Fiddler as it has passed into the realm of theatre icons.  It's crossing lines of change, challenge, and a running argument with the Divine on matters of fairness and justice, coming less than 24 hours after being pummeled by the brilliant 42, delivered a kind of knock out punch.

    Perhaps I'm just an overly sensitive boomer made a little more so by 4 decades of journalism. I've seen too much human misery delivered by injustice, prejudice, hatred, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, ignorance and mean spiritedness. 42 moves you from rage to tears to heart pumping pride. History has validated that courageous passage of breaking the color barrier in major league baseball, but the hatred and ignorance of those depicted there are alive elsewhere.

     The battle for full human rights is as current as the latest headline. Slavery, integration and women's rights were not only predecessor fights, they are still battles on this planet as now we also fight intolerance against people for how they were born or who they love. The same poisoned evil that would discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, spiritual or faith practice, gender or birthright continues as a tireless enemy of evolution of the human race. It is a hard evil to change and vigilance is important.  
      Seeing two remarkable creative efforts simply reminded me how fortunate we are to have courageous writers, film makers, photographers, artists and activists. 

HEMINGWAY AND THE BROOM
easily amused in California
Oh, that feels good-

and finally, the big yawn and stretch.

    See you down the trail.