Saturday

 

We rode our bikes with Toby to Weaver Park this morning. Once we let him out of his trailer, he plops down and starts chewing on this stick. We did some research and learned that we are exercising him too much. 

 

He needs to rest more while his bones, muscles, tendons, and joints mature. Even sniffing, loitering, and chewing on a stick help to develop his brain. We've done well in introducing him to lots of different environments and experiences, but we've pushed him too hard physically.

More bike rides, shorter walks.

 

 

Before doing our research we walked from Weaver Park to Main Street on the Pinellas Trail.

 

We crossed the street to take a look at the water.

 

Walk at dawn.

 

We did better this afternoon with shorter walks to the end of the street instead of around the block.

Miles walked: 5
Miles biked: 5.22

Thoughts on the election

 

Character counts. Facts matter. Science is real. Honor is not for sale. The environment must be conserved and cared for. Guiding principles help to govern flawed human beings as they navigate the vicissitudes of life. These are things that all Americans used to agree on, even as they disagreed on some of the details.

 

Lies are lies. Incompetence is incompetence. Cruelty is a character defect. Habitual poor management of money leads to bankruptcy. Substituting improvisation and disorganization for principles leads to chaos and fear. The natural world cannot be ignored. These are the things Donald Trump does not understand.

Donald Trump does not trouble me. He will soon be out of office and relegated to the dustbin of history as the worst president in the history of our country.

 

What troubles me is how or why almost half of the voters preferred lies, incompetence, cruelty, and financial mismanagement. It's not like the current president did not reveal exactly who he was. His recent tax records revealed that he only owed taxes for a few years out of the last 20 because he has made so many poor financial decisions that any profits he made were far outweighed by huge financial losses, leading to morally dubious tax credits. Alas, he wasn't even a successful business man. Just a carnival barker that promised an alternative reality that offered his followers the delusion that he, and he alone, could restore them to some previous way of life, some rose-colored version of the 1950s that never existed. Did he promise this because that's the life he wanted to bring to Americans--where white superiority went unchallenged, minorities knew their place, women embraced their submissive roles, and gays stayed in the closet--or, more likely, did he offer an illusion that would be the most successful at promoting himself.

Who knows if anything he said was rooted in his beliefs? I doubt that he actually has beliefs, in the sense that most people have. He seemed to really believe in only one thing: himself. Everything else was up for reconsideration at a moment's notice if he thought it might bring him more attention to sate his inherent emptiness or power to feed that same emptiness. He was nothing if not a voracious consumer of adulation. If he had been a better dictator, he would have at least used that attention and power to some effect. It turns out that all he ever wanted was to be loved.

He certainly didn't believe in the oath he took to defend the constitution, any more than he believed in the truth in the Bible he held up for a photo-op after tear-gassing peaceful protesters.

The threat to democracy has been stayed, for the moment. The real question is what will his enablers and supporters do--the ones who were willing to sacrifice our democracy for power? Perhaps we should be paying more attention to their feelings of loss and anxiety.

I read that there has been very little evidence of Russian interference in the election this time, as opposed to the election in 2016. The reason: Putin didn't need to sow chaos, division, and distrust in the institutions of government. Donald Trump was doing that well enough, without any outside interference. The result: a much weakened America. 

 

And Trump's reaction to his loss? To further corrode the people's trust in democracy even as its citizens broke a century old record of participation in the voting process.

What a pitifully weak human being.