January

It's Saturday afternoon, and my house is full of teenage boys, gathered for what has become an annual playoff-watching chicken wing fest. I don't like football or chicken wings but my sons' friends are lovely and it's quite nice to sit by a fire and watch football players run around in the snow. Better them than me. But it's really really loud in here, and I think I'll retreat to a quieter room.

*****
Well. That's better. I can hear myself think. Better still, I can't hear Cris Collinsworth or the other guy. Al Michaels. I just looked him up. They're fine, I guess, but they're not Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin. And football is definitely not hockey.

It's Day 22 of the now longest-in-U.S.-history government shutdown. I know that at least 30 percent of my fellow Americans agree with Trump's characterization of the Russia-collusion investigation as a "witch hunt" (or "Witch Hunt," I guess), but I think that investigation, when it concludes, will reveal that the President is is a paid agent of the Russian government. And whatever Putin is paying, it's money well spent.

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Enough about him. At least for today, I'm not going to write any more about Trump and his crazy tweets and his wall that he could have built any time in 2017 or 2018, except why would he when it was obviously a better political destabilization strategy to wait until the Democrats won an election to force the longest government shutdown in history? Putin is probably paying a by-the-day bonus.

No, I think I'll write a little more about this particular Saturday in January. I returned to my place of authority on the pool deck this morning, with my clipboard and my whistle and my favorite lanyard. Someone has to be in charge and it might as well be me.

I used to hate January, and I still hate winter, because it's cold and dark. But even though I don't like football, I like the festive mood that surrounds the NFL playoffs. I couldn't care less who wins any of these silly games, but I'm happy to have company and eat snacks and drink beer. On sunny days, I like the light in the afternoon. And we also have a three-day weekend in January, so it's not a month that's altogether without redeeming qualities.

Afternoon light in January. 

But I still can't wait for summer.

*****

Sunday morning, Day 23. It started to snow yesterday and we have about six inches on the ground now, with more still falling. It's the first real snowfall of the year. I'm not sure if we'll make it to Mass this morning or not. On one hand, I feel that we should at least try to get there; on the other, I don't want to get stuck in the snow, and our street has not been plowed. So we'll see.

I finished Graham Greene's 21 Stories. 10 of the 21 were quite good. The other 11 were the kind of stories that I read all the way through because the writing is beautiful but then I wonder what the heck it was that I just read. And that's not a bad thing at all. I might re-read one or two of them. But probably not. I have a lot of stuff to read, and I'm not getting any younger.

Now I'm reading The Abolition of Woman: How Radical Feminism is Betraying Women, by Fiorella Nash. So good. Of course, me reading this falls under the heading of choir members listening attentively to the proverbial preacher. I already believe that abortion is terribly anti-woman.  But in case I needed convincing, Ms. Nash makes the most compelling case I've ever read for the pro-life position as the only reasonable one for feminists.

(By the way, speaking of Day 23? In addition to having two years of Republican control to build his stupid wall, the President also had two years of a so-called pro-life majority, but Planned Parenthood remains fully funded. Weird, right? You'd almost think that they were cynically deceiving and exploiting pro-life voters during election years, and then just forgetting about them once they gain power.)

Among the most clear and logical of the author's arguments concerns the problem of maternal mortality in developing countries, which the abortion-industrial complex would solve by means of "reproductive healthcare," meaning abortion. Their real agenda, of course, is to cull the herd of poor people and non-white people. Nash asserts, correctly, that all of the causes of maternal mortality could be easily addressed as they have been in the West, in countries such as Great Britain where maternal mortality improved dramatically from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, long before legalized abortion. It's a question of will, not capacity. If women and children were truly valued, we as a society would find a way to save poor women from preventable pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths.

I would suggest that this argument could be applied to any number of issues that we treat as intractable and unsolvable. We are (for now, at least) the richest country in the world and we could easily make room for migrants and refugees. We have the most advanced technology and science in the world, and could solve the opioid crisis (how is that going, Kellyanne?) if we cared enough about the people who are suffering because of it. Our approach to most issues that affect poor people can be summed up in one sentence: There's just enough of us, but way too many of you.

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Tuesday night, Day 25. I'm watching the Capitals take a beating at the hands of the Nashville Predators in what is likely to be their third straight loss. You can't win them all, and I'm not going to worry about it. At least I'm getting a paycheck, unlike a million or more federal employees and contractors almost a month into this ridiculous fight to keep Central Americans on the other side of the Rio Grande. Maybe it's part of a grander Russian-financed strategy to make the U.S. such a terrible country that no immigrants will want to enter. I'll leave with a few words from Fiorella Nash:

"It is the fatally disastrous blind spot in current human rights campaigning, the failure to acknowledge the rights of every member of the human family, but prolife feminism represents a human rights movement which excludes no human life under any circumstances."

The Capitals are losing 6-1 now. Until next week.