THE AUDACITY OF RECOLLECTION

 

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

March 15, 2026

          I have few fond memories of the George W. Bush era, but I want to share another person’s memory. This is from then-Senator Barack Obama’s memoir The Audacity of Hope describing his 2004 swearing-in at the start of the second Bush administration.

A young Marine at the door politely indicated that the photograph session was over and that the President needed to get to his next appointment. But before I could turn around to go the President himself appeared in the doorway and waved me over.

’Obama!’ the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours—that’s one impressive lady.’

’We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,’ I said, shaking the First Lady’s hand and hoping I’d wiped the crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a bog dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

’Want some?’ the President asked. ‘Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.’

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

’Come over here for a second,’ he said, leading me off to one side of the room. ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.’

’Not at all, Mr. President.’

He nodded. ‘You’ve got a bright future,’ he said. ‘Very bright. But I’ve been in this town a while and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.’

…[As] we walked to the door I told him a few stories from the campaign. It wasn’t until he had left the room that I realized I had briefly put my arm over his shoulder as we talked—an unconscious habit of mine, but one that I suspected might have made many of …the Secret Service agents in the room, more than a little uneasy.

          Now that is audacity. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s an example of disrespectful behavior, or the more common meaning of a bold move. You always chance, when you act audaciously, having your brashness be confused with rudeness. That sort of audacity, that willingness to boldly say or act because the stakes are too high not to, that we must present ourselves.

In this climate almost nothing is more audacious than remembering that it was June 16, 2015, 11 years ago, Donald Trump appeared at the top of an escalator with gold gilding in New York’s tower named for him. Who would have predicted at that time we would still be under his sway, let alone talking about him, all these years later?

          It should have been an indication what he was capable of when his first words on taking the stage were, “That is some group of people. Thousands!” According to contemporary news accounts there were, at best, a few dozen people in attendance, certainly no more than a hundred. Any others Trump imagined were on the other ends of cameras, of which there were also only a few, and except for Fox and CNN, those were all local. Any idea that the truth of the situation might temper his tendencies was smashed when, after his inauguration in January 2117, Trump’s factotum, Sean Spicer, reported Trump’s crowd size at “a million and a half” attendees while professional crowd counters came up between 3 and 600,000, well below the first inauguration of Barack Obama conservatively estimated at over 1,000,000 people. It is also instructive that this was the first time we heard the phrase “alternative facts.”

          It’s important to Trump that his White House continues, in the face of multiple facts, to trumpet his guesstimate. [It is also important because memory matters. John Gardner reminds us in Grendel, his novelization of the Beowulf legend, memory is supernal in the way that someone’s lies, deceitful, flattering untruths, as the monster puts it, “changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it…[They] who knew the truth remembered it his way—and so did I.”]

          Here’s one of my memories. January 2009 I was teaching a class at a suburban business that began at about the point Obama would be finishing up. I listened to his speech while I drove from another class. We thought it would never happen, and here it was, the first Black American president. And he was talking about things that were important to me. I recall his humble tone and willingness to reach out to others. Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

          Now, I will remind you that, among other things, this was still three years before Joe Biden would convince Obama his position on marriage equality was outdated and he publicly supported same sex couples marrying, eventually becoming law. So even with the positives in that speech, there was greater room for better to come.

          I was so enthralled listening to this I sat in my car in the parking lot an extra 15 minutes, soaking up as much of that feeling as possible. Class, of course, began later than usual, but most of the other students walked in when I did. One, a Muslim woman from Africa, had arrived early and sat in another student’s car, and they listened to the entire speech together.

          [It may be worth noting that where I got this excerpt, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, promises a full transcript via a link to the White House. The White House has removed that transcript.]

          Am I remembering the lush sense of potential correctly? To test myself, I read an essay by one of my favorite New York Review writers, Darryl Pinckney, describing an appearance by then-Senator Obama in Indianapolis. “What Obama most projects is intellectual honesty, a sense that he has thought things through or is going to try to.”

          And a year later, writing about Obama’s inauguration: “President Obama’s speech was eloquent enough, starting with the fact that he used the word ‘I’ only three times throughout the course of his recollections on ‘the work of remaking America.’…[What] surprised many of us about Obama’s inaugural address was not the absence of rhetorical finery, but how basic and insistent was his reiteration of the premises on which he said we as a nation had always told ourselves we stood.”

          Further,

President Obama’s chastisement of the nation for the drift and low spirits of recent years exempted no one, including himself—everywhere he cautioned of the labor ahead…No slogans, no self-congratulation, but a definite end to the atmosphere of corruption. [He is pledged to transparency in governmental practice in order to ‘restore the vital trust between a people and their government…’]

In Harlem, they say that he is president of the world, [and the photographs of people watching the swearing-in ceremony from Kabul to Nairobi suggest that President Obama was at times so plainspoken in his speech in an effort to reach people who speak English in other countries, talking in a language the world could understand.] It was only after things were over that I remembered how much of the world had been watching…The dignity of the nation was gathered up into his assertion that ‘our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.’

The pride with which people came away from the Mall was owing in great measure to their profound respect for President Obama. As much as he tried to merge into his message, or to lower expectations of what he’ll be able to accomplish, I was moved by the thought that we hadn’t seen his like before.

         [I don’t have to tell you who looks pretty bad in contrast.]

Am I guilty of looking at the recent past with rose-colored glasses? I may be. But like looking at Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, even Reagan and, now he’s safely dead, Jimmy Carter, it’s hard to take off those glasses when contrasting them with whatever era we might be reading from. A previous administration almost always looks better than the current one.

          But remember the things we’ve lost to a Trump administration. Perhaps calling these policies “lost” is incorrect. We haven’t mislaid them and however we might feel they haven’t been taken from us. The current administration has decided these are somehow out of reach, either because of finances or a strained morality, but we worked long and hard to achieve them, to convince enough people of their rightness that they understood with us that a sane, good society needs them. They are things we believe in.

          We believe in a person's sovereignty over their own body.  While the Dobbs v Jackson decision was reached after Trump was defeated the first time it was after he had appointed 4 conservative justices to the Supreme Court, including at least one who by rights should have been Obama's nominee. The right of a woman to make her own pregnancy decisions is, or should be, inviolate.  Likewise, the right of an individual to determine what body they’re comfortable in is sacrosanct.

We believe in the separation of church and state. As Obama said, Americans have the right to choose in a god or a discipline we believe, or choose not to believe, and the right not to be subordinate to someone else’s belief or nonbelief.  We believe in programs like USAID, that helped develop foreign policy and lessen poverty, enhance healthcare worldwide and make economies stronger. Prior to its dismantling, USAID was credited with preventing 75 million deaths, many of them in underdeveloped nations [in Africa and Asia.]

          We believe in an independent Center for Disease Control. In 2024 there were a total of 284 cases of measles; in 2025, a full year of the Directorship of Robert F. Kennedy Jr brought that number to a staggering 2283 cases. In these first 3 months of 2026 there are already 1281 cases.

          We believe in meaningful work. Just since Donald Trump assumed office again manufacturing lost 88,000 jobs, more than 10,000,000 people have been out of work for at least 6 months, over 4.7 million people are underemployed, unemployment among the young has jumped from 9.3% of job-seekers in 2023 to 13.9%.

What kind of quality can we put on our sense of safety or security in the actions of our government? How do we even measure that? After the disastrous rollout of Covid 19 prevention under Trump during which it was suggested by him we inject ourselves or swallow noxious chemicals, some intended for other species, or shining ultraviolet light up our system, 1,124,000 people have died. Since Trump’s reelection and expanded powers for ICE and the CBP 48 people have been reported dying in detention centers around the country, and another 8 people, famously including two who were videotaped, were also killed by ICE agents in public. For many of us this is shockingly new, but for just as many others it’s dismayingly familiar. A veneer has been pulled back to display the rot beneath.

          We’ve seen the sacrifice of DEI, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, on the altar of the lies of wasteful government initiatives, preferential treatment, and hurt feelings. These programs helped correct past wrongs and contemporary setbacks. When we say we believe in DEI we echo our Unitarian Universalist values of an individual’s inherent worth and dignity, of justice, equity and compassion.

These are the ideas and policies we believe in. We fought long and hard and some of us died to achieve them, and just because Trump and his followers don’t share our8 belief doesn’t mean they are gone. It’ll take time but we’ll get them back.

          Because when you believe in an ideal like equality or feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or treating one another with respect and dignity, it’s not something you can cross out of a budget. We bought those things with muscle and blood. It’s not a pet rock or platform shoes. We can’t live up to our best without them.

          It’s a truism among political wonks that a leader is someone who watches which direction the people are going and runs out ahead shouting, “Follow me!” We don’t elect a leader to tell us what to do, we elect one to inspire us to do better.

          Can we do better than Donald Trump? Yes, we can. Can we do better than Barack Obama? Yes, we can. I don’t know what that looks like but they’re out there. We’ll know them when we hear them, the belief, the certainty in their voice and actions that we can and must be better. To quote the title of a James Carville book from the 90s that popped down the memory hole, We’re Right, They’re Wrong. There’s nothing wrong with certainty in helping others. We must hold to that belief if we’re going to return those values to their proper place.

         

Too Young to Lose My Best Friend

 I'm listening to my Cocteau Twins Pandora station. It was one of the groups she'd introduced me to, along with the Bush Tetras, Hazel O'Connor, the Sugarcubes and Bjork, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Violent Femmes, and dozens of others I've forgotten in the ensuing decades. 

I don't remember our meeting but I have an approximate year: 1982 or 83. I was a tutor and she was one of my students in for writing help. I don't remember what her issues were beyond misspellings and the occasional missing punctuation, but somehow we bonded beyond the needs of Composition 1 and our friendship took on greater importance as the years passed. She was the first to get me drunk. It was my 25th birthday and we celebrated with several of her housemates with Melon Balls, Kamikazes, and, in a final booze-filled marathon chess session played among a half dozen sleeping bodies, Malibu Rum. 

We attended a half dozen Rainbow Gatherings together, and at the Nantahala Forest Gathering, the 1st for both of us, she managed to dodge the dysentery that laid most of us low. After, she told me how she accidentally avoided getting arrested 60 miles inside Babylon, by absently reaching down to pet the head of the drug-sniffing dog that was about to find the stash in her pocket. The grateful animal, as she said it, "just looked up into my eyes with her tongue out and such a look of, 'Oh, hi, do you want to play?', that her handler yanked her back hard and that was the end of that. They had to let us go." 

I'm unsure which of us graduated first, or if she graduated. Those years, graduation wasn't really very important to any of us back then, although we all expected to. What was important then were adventures, the sorts of events that happened and you talked about them later. We attended a couple weekend workshops but didn't have the money to stay in a motel. So we slept in my car. At one, after we'd finished for the day and had some dinner, we found an out-of-the-way road, mostly dirt track, and figured it was remote enough to safely sleep there. Along 1 or 2 o'clock I was woken by her insistent, "Someone's at the door" next to my ear, not so much whispered as said in amazement. It was a cop. 

Windows rolled down in cars then so I rolled the one closest to me and said, very quizzically, "Hi?" He said, "Do you know the owner of this property? Has he said you could stay here?" I said, "We didn't even know it was property, we thought we were out in the woods." He said, "Well, you're in someone's driveway and he's not around apparently, but if he comes by you'll have to move." That seemed reasonable to me, the having to move part, so I agreed and he got back in his car and we went back to sleep. In the early morning as the fog lifted, we could dimly see a house at the other end of the drive. The owner had either never come home or he'd never left. 

Another story, this one not involving me, one she told me. She'd been walking through the Student Union on her way somewhere when she'd got a whiff of someone's patchouli as he walked by. The tribe we hung with loved patchouli but found it hard to locate. She walked swiftly beside him and asked, "Is that patchouli? Did you get it around here? I love patchouli and..." He stopped suddenly, looked down at her--in her story he was over 6 feet--and announced, "It's obvious you want to engage me in  conversation but I don't want to." And he strode off, leaving her open-mouthed in his wake, incredulous when she told me, as if it was impossible someone wouldn't want to talk with her. I could not imagine why not. I was honored by her friendship. 

We attended more Gatherings, went more places, did more things. Most everyone wanted to talk with one of us everywhere we went. Somewhere in there we became lovers, although never exclusive, in defiance of everything we'd thought we were to each other. What she became to me, I'm sorry to say, was the human equivalent of home, someone that when you go there she has to take you in. I told myself that's all I was to her as well. Of course, that was wrong, both factually and morally. When she stopped talking to me after I married, my wife encouraged me to contact her. "You're too young to lose your best friend," she told me. 

That's a lousy story to end on, so here's a better one. Another Gathering, we had dropped acid together (when we talked about this last week while she was in hospice and I'd driven 1500 miles to spend time with her she insisted it was her first time, a possibility her sister later doubted, so we'll let it go) and then found ourselves at night at a jam session where, for some reason, she'd needed to take medicine. She dropped it and the two of us bent in the shadows, heads down, rummaging around among the leaves and twigs and loam for the pill. Suddenly, something dropped on her head, bounced, and landed in her open hand. It was the pill. We laughed because the universe opened a rift in time below our hands and another above our heads. It had decided to fuck with us and that was all right with us. That is how I will remember her, laughing. 

Uncomfortable Places Where I've Slept

 

There are no chickens in this story

MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR, NORTH CHESTNUT STREET, 

NEW PALTZ

 

I’d met this guy Jonathon while working semester opens at the college bookstore. He was really introverted but we got along. He invited me to a party in The City, although who he knew there I never figured out. The two of us rode out on the Trailways bus and took a subway to wherever the apartment was. I’m necessarily a little hazy on the details.

Most of the night for me was in bursts and flashes. I remember drinking tequila and then fashioning some concoction from other alcohols. I remember making out with a woman in a room away from the party but other than long reddish hair I don’t remember anything about her. This is a big part of the reason Jonathon later stopped being friends with me because I found out she was someone he liked and had hoped to get to know at this party. I wasn’t much of one for niceties like that in those years.

When the party broke up at 1 or 2 we took the subway back to Penn Station but there were no busses leaving until 7. So we joined the ranks of the homeless who squatted in the one room inside the station the cops kept open for them. Once an hour they rousted us to another end of the room, saying “No one sleeps!” But I did as I was riotously drunk and between bouts of laughing at the cops (not a practice I’d suggest) and trudging from spot to spot, I huddled on the floor and slept the fitful half-doze known to both the inebriated and those trying to have conversations with them. Jonathon spent the whole time standing and trying both to stay near me, like I was protection, and being as far from other people as he could.

Eventually the sun came up and at 630 we could buy tickets, with which we could stay the half hour to 7 while the others were bounced into the street. The bus ride was two hours but to me it seemed both like hours longer and just a few moments. We reached town, I walked with Jonathon as far as the corner of Main and North Chestnut where we parted, him to his room and me  to my apartment.

Now this is where it becomes uncomfortable.

I’m one of those lucky few born with some immunity to the bad effects of drugs and alcohol. I’ve never had a bad trip from LSD, never gotten paranoid while smoking weed or hash, never experienced anything but stupendous and unremembered epiphanies on shrooms or peyote. Never had a hangover no matter how much I drank. Except that time.

My headache began on the bus but I put it down to the sun in my eyes and lack of solid sleep. As I walked, I could feel each step travel from my foot through my body to the tiny hammer banging my brain. I had never felt so happy getting to my apartment, so much so I opened the door and did a faceplant on the floor. I didn’t feel like I could make it to bed, I just laid there and slept.

Or I tried to. It seemed that day everyone in the world I knew chose to visit me, either in groups or singly. Again, only fleeting memories but I do remember a stream of drool from my mouth to a small pool next to me when the first person, whoever it was, knocked at the door. Stupid me, it never occurred to me not to say, “Come in,” although that wouldn’t have accomplished much as I had a habit of not locking my door and encouraging people to walk in.

I alternately curled into the fetal position or spread full out like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. I may have even resembled that drawing a little as my hair was curly and long and sweat-plastered to the floor. I vaguely recall Jonathon coming by with another friend of ours, I don’t remember who, and looking smugly down on my pain. I probably cried once or twice. No one, fortunately, stayed long, or I don’t think they did, because I kept drifting back off to sleep after a few sentences describing my head variously as a deflated basketball, a cracked egg, a fishbowl full of fecal water, a balloon blown up by a congested drunken bum. There may have been more.

Eventually the night came, and far from being refreshed, I was so worn by the exhaustion of breathing through a mouth equal parts dry and swampy I fell finally into bed wearing the same clothes I’d worn to the party now 24 hours before and drifted in and out of consciousness until 5 or 6 the next morning, when I got up, stretched my 45 minute routine, and then put on running shorts and took a ginger mile and a half jog. Outside the day-long, incessant hammering, that was my usual start to the morning, which may have been why I didn’t usually suffer otherwise

Try the Best You Can

 

Much of my time lately has been given over to reading rather than writing. But I did produce a service for my facility folks. It was initially meant to reference May 8th but because of misunderstandings at work among the chaplains, it will actually play this coming Sunday. As a result, I removed most references to the 8th being Mother's Day. That version playing at the facility also is a little different in that I produced essentially a slideshow for during the service that meant I didn't need to appear onscreen. (One of the changes I foresee in sermons is the lessening of the preacher's physical presence and the greater emphasis on his or her voice.) 

Service for May 8

 

Song (“Everybody Hurts”) 

 

Welcome. Welcome to this place where we have nightmares, but we also have dreams. Where we feel confused, but we also understand. Where we are afraid, but we also find courage. You are welcome. Together we make it a holy place.

 

Scripture passage

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. ² He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters, ³ he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. ⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley,^[a]  I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. ⁵ You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. ⁶ Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

 

Homily/Meditation

 

          Let’s take that video I showed you by the group REM as a metaphor for what most of us are experiencing. Gridlock. Impasse. Jammed up. For a lot of us, that’s the way life feels often, like just a moment ago we were cruising down the superhighway, windows down, enjoying the swiftly moving air and the excitement that comes with speed. And a moment later, Bam, we’re locked down in traffic. Nowhere we can go. Hundreds of cars in a single boundaried space, like we’re water in a hose and someone has his thumb on the nozzle, just a trickle leaking out so we move forward by inches, a foot an hour.

          The solution for the people in the video is to get out and walk. You see them suddenly, as one, opening their doors and walking together, alone, in pairs, holding hands some of them, in the same direction, like they all know where they’re going. Wouldn’t we give anything to solve our sense of gridlock like that? To just step out of what’s holding us back and walk?

          In reality, of course, even one person getting out of their car and walking away will only make it worse for everyone else. For a solution like this you need everyone deciding beforehand this is how they’ll handle things, and outside a music video there’s not likely to be many people who’ll do that.

          Psalm 23, which I read to you after the video, may be one answer to that. It’s said to be, after The Lord’s Prayer, the most recognized poem in Western literature. Surely its description of comfort resonates with most of us, a sense of bucolic ease and transcendence, imagining us as sheep looked over by a caring shepherd or parent figure, a mother who will refresh and guide us through the harshest, most dangerous terrain, and back into safety and food.

          Pastors often talk about the pastor as the shepherd in this and other psalms. To shepherd also means to guide, and in relation to today, to mother. It’s ironic that the word “shepherd”, has come down to us as a synonym for pastor. Shepherd comes down to us from Old English, as does sheep, two of the few words that have, and a thousand years ago shepherds were buried with wool in their hands to prove their vocation and explain why they hadn’t been to church on Sundays.

          And consider the use that the word sheep has come down to us to mean. Gentle. Oblivious. Obtuse. Stubborn. Most of us experience sheep behind a fence as we zip by on the road. There they are, chewing intently on grass, ignorant as cows. In fact, in the way the portmanteau term “sheeple” has come to us, meaning docile, silly, easily fooled or led, as a derogatory political term for voters on the other side, I don’t think any thinking person would want to have the word sheep associated with them. In a word, sheep are dumb.

          Minnesota sheep farmer Catherine Friend deplores my ignorance. She writes, “Sheep are just steady, reliable, unchanging. Today’s sheep is much like the sheep of 10,000 years ago. They do an excellent job of being exactly what they are…Sheep understand food. They understand danger. They understand caring for their babies…Sheep aren’t born with an understanding of gates or tractors or the knowledge that if they don’t get themselves into the barn right now the farmer will miss the kickoff for the Super Bowl.”

          I want to assert right here that you, by which I mean me too, all of us, can be sheep. Because this is what happens when sheep run into that gridlock I spoke of earlier.

 

Sheep have two flight zones, shaped like cones, that serve as brilliant protection. One cone spreads backward from its head. If you approach a sheep directly from behind or from slightly to the side, you’ll step into this flight zone and the sheep will surge forward…

The sheep has a second flight zone, this cone reaching from its head forward. If you approach a sheep from the front and step inside this zone, will the sheep turn around and run in the opposite direction?

No, she will not…That sheep is going to do the last thing you’d expect. If you step into that forward flight zone, the ewe will shoot straight toward you, a white blurred streak that passes within inches of your useless hands, leaving you standing there, mouth agape. You will both look and feel stupid. You will understand that even though you have more brain cells than a sheep, you have the reaction time of a slug.

         

          We’re all sheep. I don’t mean that as a put down. I’m not talking about sheep as passive but as squirming, lively, noise-making beasts in flight from the problems we’re experiencing, the issues we have, the fears chasing us. There’s no effective shepherd as we’re too fast, too agile, too often do the unexpected thing when we run.

          And boy, do we run. Always running, as babies we hit the ground running, like sheep. And while we may be unable to articulate it, and that’s legitimate because you’ve been running too hard to find words or a definition of what you’re running from or what safety you’re running to.

          Be patient with each other. Breathe. Focus. Be with other people as a nursing mother tending to her children. Walk away from the gridlock however you can and toward one another. Do the best things in the worst times. Try the best you can. But be patient. We are sheep and we are running to find where we belong.

 

 

Prayer

We pause in the stillness to rest for a moment, to quiet ourselves so that we can feel what stirs within us. Each breath draws us closer to the pulse of life and with each exhalation we make room for something new. May we find in this gathering the comfort of those who care. May we encounter patience along our growing edges and compassion in our most tender spots. Here may we find the inspiration and encouragement we need to face our challenges and nurture ourselves. And in the presence of suffering across the globe may we redouble our efforts to practice kindness where we are, with the hope that the light of our actions travels like the light of faraway stars. May our gestures of compassion and generosity seed possibility. May we travel humbly with one another, choosing reconciliation over resentment as we try to live right-sized. When life presses in and shifts us off balance, when pain assails us, when frustration mounts, may the rhythm of our breath steady us and bring us back to a place of gratitude.

 

Benediction

Take comfort, friends. The journey is long. The path is often difficult. And the future is uncertain. But take comfort. Deep down there is another truth. You are not alone.

 

Song (“Optimistic”) 

Death of an(other) environmentalist

While we fretted over our inability to hold the trump administration to account, and that was indeed a problem, small murders like this were happening elsewhere. And while it is unlikely trump had a hand in it, it smacked too neatly of the rationale behind many of his offenses: Do it because you can get away with it.

ENVIRONMENT
FEBRUARY 1, 2020 / 7:48 PM / 2 DAYS AGO
At famed Mexican butterfly reserve, second worker found dead
Alan Ortega

URUAPAN, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican authorities said on Saturday they are investigating the possible murder of a tour guide working at a famous butterfly reserve in the western state of Michoacan, just two days after its former environmental activist was buried.

Raul Hernandez’s body was found in the area in the early hours of Saturday, with different parts beaten, and a head injury possibly caused by a sharp object, the state attorney general said.

Earlier this week, Mexicans in El Rosario mourned the death of activist Homero Gomez, who had fought for a decade to protect the monarch butterflies until his mysterious death. It is unclear whether the two cases are connected.

The sudden disappearance of such a high-profile campaigner had sparked an outcry in Mexico, an increasingly violent country where activists are routinely threatened, harmed or even killed as a result of their work.

Millions of the orange and black insects make a 2,000-mile (3,220-km) journey each year from Canada to winter in central Mexico’s warmer weather. However, they are facing new challenges linked to extreme weather and changing habitat.

Michoacan state is not only home to the country’s largest monarch butterfly reserve, a World Heritage Site, but also rival drug gangs who battle to control smuggling routes through often-arid terrain to the Pacific and the interior of the country.

Real-life Where's Waldo

This is an excellent video and explanation for both defining white privilege and explaining ways to use it. If Brittany Packnett is emotional, remember it's her life she's talking about.

It shouldn't be so hard, in 2018, to explain what this privilege is, but it shouldn't be so hard to see how poorly Donald Trump is administering the country, and that's something at least the same number of people refuse to understand. Too many whites focus on the word "privilege," thinking of themselves or their friends, and in their arguments focus on what they can't do. But it's not about what white people can or can't do, it's how they're seen by people with authority.

For better and worse, I often think of this in terms of what I have gotten away with in the past. My years of shoplifting and taking drugs and being drunk in public, and how I was aware I was likely not to be seen as someone who was doing those things. Most black or Hispanic men of the same age could not do so since their simply being there puts the shop owner or cop on a higher alert. It can be a function of just being aware there's a person whose color doesn't blend in with the shades surrounding him. As Packnett puts it, White privilege isn't a blame or an excuse but "a lens to understand how race works in this country, where white people are the default and everyone else has to adjust." It's a condition of the privilege of being seen as just like everyone else, rather than being seen as an anomaly. The same is true of people in wheelchairs or blind people: they stand out by virtue of the majority around them being "normal." For many in authority, it's a real-life game of Where's Waldo. The game is made more serious for both authority and the person singled out because at times both person's livelihood or life is at stake.

But that same normality means it can be valuable to use in bringing attention to how people who aren't white, or aren't capable of blending into the background, face issues the majority are unaware exist. I think here of my old teaching practice of blindfolding students and leading them around by a rope to make them aware how they default to the use of their eyes and not their other senses. In doing so, their writing could be opened to allow in a newer, richer way of describing the world around them. Similarly, being aware how someone benefits from the way he sees the people surrounding him can open him to a newer, richer way of interacting with them.

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The days when I had many friends who rode this horse are long behind me. But I remain glad of any help in keeping other people like them alive. To argue, as Maine's governor Paul LaPage does, that providing access to Naloxone provides abusers an out that simply leaves them free to shoot up again is not only, like Alexander Walley says, like arguing "that seatbelts encourage riskier driving," but suggests that some lives are more worth saving than others. Arguing that is not a moral choice but a moral failing. After all, no one would say that alcoholics shouldn't have AA available to them because it only gives them the chance to make their next binge sweeter. No one abuses a drug in order to make her life more exciting, only to make it seem that way. The reality is very, very boring. While a lot of people shooting up want to continue, a lot more don't, and they should be given every chance to eventually make that decision. Every chance. As Jesus said, forgiving another type of abuse, "seventy times seven."

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I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: When I was younger, I wanted to experience ayahuasca, but I never did. I expected that, if I were to make it to Arcosanti, I would have it available to me, and it might have been. But I never made it there either. But it's good to know such places as this exist, where shamans presumably give the drug the respect it demands.