January 6

It is sunny today but very cold. The temperature on the thermometer on the fence read 8*F. It has just risen above 10. We won't get out of the teens today. Yesterday we had bouts of windblown snow much of which came off the Lake. We didn't get much accumulation for which I am grateful because I haven't cleared a path on the patio. I finally put up the winter wreath about five weeks later than usual.

Tom Engelhardt has a good post on his tomdispatch site. His comments about what we, individually and collectively, remember is right on point. I can see some of the process playing out as large parts of our population want to minimize the pandemic and erase the insurrection. Like Engelhardt I wonder what future generations will remember. I keep thinking of the phrase that became a mantra in the later installments of Battlestar Galactica: this has happened before and will happen again.

John Feffer at Foreign Policy in Focus has an interesting piece today. He writes about the way civil war came to what used to be Yugoslavia. Between the late 1980 the populace went from believing the slogan "brotherhood and unity" to shooting each other in 1991. He could have chosen a couple of times in American history for similar sudden times when the "us" became "us vs. them" . It took only a bit more than a decade from the end of the French and Indian War (after which most American colonials felt pride being part of the British empire and subjects of the king) to full blown rebellion. And it was only a decade between the Compromise of 1850 (the last measure designed to defuse the simmering tempers over slavery) to civil war. In one of the post apocalyptic novels I like to read sometimes a major character tells the small group gathering around him that they need to decide what they are going to do and where they will go and "whether there is a 'we' to do it. I don't know if there is an us in the U.S. any more.