Pretty, and Ominous
Project: Pioneer #56, October 13, 2024 Sunday 9am
It’s the last hurrah here in summer/fall pioneer-land. Most of the other settlers are winterizing their covered wagons and wrapping them for the winter. They’re mostly weekenders, so they have a cozy home to go back to and hibernate. Some will snowbird, heading to warmer climates for the cold season. Lucky! I’m guessing that’s not Florida—not the Sarasota area anyway. The very few full-time stationary folks like us are waiting for the others to wrap up their business so we can prepare to relocate next weekend.
Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.
Out in the woods around us, there were lots of tall fires crackling last night, burning off the last of the wood in the piles. Voices rise along with the blood-alcohol level through the trees, folks relaxing after a long day of battening down the hatches. The world turns, the seasons come and go, the wheel of time carries us forward until it’s time for us to get off.
I was at a high-school football game in the unusual cold Friday night. The Northern Lights were quite evident and beautiful, and everyone marveled, phones up like a Taylor Swift concert. I heard no one express concern, and wondered if anyone else had the same ominous feeling I did. The Northern Lights shouldn’t be visible here, certainly not so often, certainly not a regular visitor. It’s not a good thing, it’s a harbinger of chaos and likely death. I’ve written about that. Those lights are pretty, and ominous. I had a lot of wifi, cellular, and GPS trouble on the trip. It’s affecting us. A Bluetooth water dispenser turned on by itself a few times, spewing water onto the floor. It’s happening.
Perhaps another reason for this ominous feeling lately is that the election looms so close. There’s plenty of reason to be optimistic—the polls (if you can believe them) are close but in the right direction. Giavana and I have been working hard for Harris and the down-ballot Democratic ticket. Harris-Walz yard signs are popping up like mushrooms.
Yet, Trump looms, as a purely evil man who will stop at nothing to have his way, to have this country, to stay out of prison. He seems to have given up on trying to win the actual election, and pivoted to grifting as much money as he can milk from it and taking every measure to prepare his cult for violence in his name (his favorite thing, after money and flattery). There are no other real explanations for his planned events at Coachella in California and Madison Square Garden in NYC. He’s more aggressively and openly spewing his hate speech. Those aren’t exactly contested swing states. Or, perhaps he knows the fix is in and he’ll win through the many un-democratic moves being made by his minions in the state election boards.
He’s selling photo ops for $25,000 and “VIP Experience” seating for $5,000 each. If violence breaks out by bringing his herd of sheep into very liberal territory, he’ll have a huge opportunity to capitalize on that as a rally for yet more violence, perhaps the civil war he’ll need to take power after he loses the election. He’s got the lunatic richest man on the planet on his side now, also displaying erratic and questionably sane behavior (when he’s not showing off fake robots and robo-taxis). He’s asking why nobody has tried to kill Harris—something that would land any of us regular folks in jail or at least a visit from the Secret Service. F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich aren’t like you and me.
DeSantis in Florida and Trump are calling for networks to lose their broadcast licenses for airing ads and content in opposition to their views. It’s the most fundamental anti-American First Amendment thing possible, but it’s also clear they no longer support or believe in the US Constitution. They want something else. Trump is now calling not just for illegal immigrants to be removed, but anyone who doesn’t have the “look” he considers to be the master race, quintessential American, i.e White European.
The situation in the Middle East also feels ominous. Netanyahu seems to be dragging us toward war, like Israel did with their false intelligence to get us to invade Iraq, kill so many innocent civilians, and over 5,000 of our own brave warriors. Like Trump, he lusts to keep himself in power and out of prison, no matter how many innocent people must die. Ukraine as well, with top Republicans like Speaker Johnson openly saying they “no longer have an appetite to help Ukraine.” They’re welcoming Russia to do what Hitler did, and without our opposition, this time it will work. We will have our world carved into just a few dictatorships, and it will happen fast if Trump wins. Or, we’ll have a devastating war where many of us will die.
Lastly, the massive destruction of the hurricanes in “safe” idyllic mountaintop places like Asheville, NC. These ever more powerful weather events are ominous. They're coming to you, it's a matter of time. It won't be on TV breaking news, it will be in your home. Prepare. Read my prior posts to learn how.
Back to us here in pioneer land, our solar gear is in and ready to be picked up on Monday, which we look forward to. It’s a big exposure finally closed. We’ve got capacity to store a ton of energy, and pull more when needed through several 200 watt panels. It’s a tidy solution to the problem, leaving the only long-term off-grid survival item left as some kind of water collection and purification system. That might depend where we land after everything plays out between now and late January. After we move to our winter location next week, we’ll be inventorying and organizing all of our prepper gear.
That aside, we can’t wait until it’s over. We dream of no more political commercials, and a life without all this stress, without the stain of Trump, finally. We’ll still have the problem of a large percentage of our population among us who worship a despicable person like that. Hopefully, Giavana, Pia and I are busy finding an isolated place to build our cabin to live out our days in peace and beauty. I’d like to have more time to read the many books and emails around my hobbies and interests that are piled up high. I’d like to have time to just…do nothing some days. I’d like to have a place where Giavana and I can dress up on occasion and go out for a great dinner and fun night out. It all feels like a dream, one we dare not put too much stock in—yet. Maybe it will happen, maybe we’ll have earned it after these recent very hard years in this world.
That’s the ticket, I’ve just convinced myself. Less ominous, more optimism! Soon, we’ll know. In the meantime, please help fight this any way you can at moveon.org, swingleft.org, or indivisible.org.
"I am confident that, in the end, common sense and justice will prevail. I'm an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily ever after."—Cat Stevens
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”―Anne Frank
“Optimism doesn’t mean that you are blind to the reality of the situation. It means that you remain motivated to seek a solution to whatever problems arise.”—The Dalai Lama
This pioneer journey continues…
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