I took down my sister's Christmas decorations for her today, she's not well enough to do it herself. It's an occasion to remember the mixed blessing of remembering who made what, who had what. This ornament was made by our niece who died of her terrible and tragic mental illness, made worse by the authorized, approved "treatments" that she sought. This one by a beloved aunt long passed, this one a favorite of our mother, this one given to her by another sister of my generation who may well not live to see another Christmas.
It's not a happy meditation on loss and not knowing what becomes of them but good to understand them better for having the complications of things like a mental illness to mask that they were good people mixed up and weak like we all are. I find that I understand a lot of the people I lost far, far better than I did when I was with them every day.
Taking down the lights which, for some reason, my sister thinks look best if they are put any which way, tangled together and so frustrating to take apart, I thought of what it must have been like for our father to navigate the world blinded fighting Nazism and fascism in World War Two for the decades after that. He and all of us certainly tangled not a few times when we lived together, but that's all past and done and gone and seems so much less important than it did when he was still alive. I won't bother trying to talk my sister out of doing that crazy stuff when she puts her own tree up, she'll never change. She's way too old to change. I'll try to remember to ask her if she wants me to do it for her, next time. Maybe I'll look back on it some day as a folly I miss. Maybe she'll remember me and how cranky I could get around taking down the tree.
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One of the things I do some days is listen to the daily mass, in the past from the Boston archdioceses, now the Daily TV Mass from Canada. I started doing that in memory of our mother who listened to the one from Boston. Today's sermon by Fr. Michael Coutts S.J. was, in no small part, about Donald Trump and his unsuitability for having the trust those who put him in office.
He didn't mention him by name but he asked if someone knew a guy who was a flagrant womanizer or a sleazy, dishonest multiply-bankrupted businessman or otherwise a sleaze asked someone if they would be OK with them marrying their daughter, wouldn't they decidedly not be OK with that? Of course no one in their right mind would want their daughter to marry someone like that, like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson or so many others you can name around the world. Why, then, did so many of us think someone like that would be a good Prime Minister or other national or more local leader. Typing this, I believe Fr. Coutts didn't say "president," but I'll bet not a single person who heard the sermon didn't know what he said directly referred to Donald Trump, it's impossible that he didn't know that as he wrote his sermon, the week that Donald Trump might well have set off World War III.
It's a good question, certainly a better one than our idiot media made the standard for deserving a vote, if you'd want to sit down and have a beer with someone, an idea that I was amazed Barack Obama was dumb enough to try when the cop arrested Prof. Gates for trying to get into his own house while being Black, one of the reasons I'm hoping that the idiot Biden doesn't last far past New Hampshire, as well. You go home after you've had a beer with someone, if he's a drunken jerk, he doesn't go home with you and burn the house down.
I think that is the answer to Fr. Coutts question, we are sold these sleazes through the media and the debased standards of judgement that are promoted in it, this one especially condescending to that iconic plaster dummy that Biden references so often, the "working class white guy". If the working class white guy was shown more respect maybe he'd be less likely to buy into that insulting upper-class, college-credentialed presentation of him in the media. Someone who respected himself more than the media gives him permission to might be more resistant to a con man like Trump. I'd ask him if he'd want his daughter to marry Trump - the real, probably infected philanderer, sexual molester, daddy-financed con-man and gangster and all round piece of crap - and when the answer is no, asking why anyone would want him as president where he has the chance to ruin all of our lives.
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