First: my workout was a 5 mile walk (W. Peoria) in the heat of late morning; the stride felt fine.
Then weights: rotator cuff, pull ups (5 sets of 10: good), military: 2 sets of 15 x 50 seated, supported, 10 x 40 standing, rows: 3 sets of 10 x 50 single arm. Incline: 10 x 135 (tough), 7 x 160 decline, goblet squats: sets of 6 with 40, 50, 50, planks, knee stretches.
I honestly think my glutes are firming up.
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Yeah, the Trump tweets ticked me off…you don’t tell US citizens to go elsewhere. I didn’t tell anti-Obama people that when they belly ached and complained.
If there is one thing that burns me about conservatives is that they are very sanctimonious and feel that THEY have some inherit right to say what is American and what isn’t ..as if they were umpires. They are NOT, and Leonard Pitts says it very well:
“You, like them, take for granted that America is your house, a white house where you make the rules, you set the standards and the rest of us live only by your sufferance. That’s the assumption embedded in your tweets: that you have the right to tell the rest of us to — apologies to the Beatles — “get back to you where you once belonged.””
Yes, conservatives, it is your country, AND mine, and yes, theirs too.
But there is really no “shaming them”..no amount of outrage that will work.
“How DARE you…” is met with…”womp womp.”
And this reminded me of this old short story about The Devil and Daniel Webster (read the whole thing; it is short)
The plot: a farmer had some terrible luck and made an oath that he’d sell his soul to the Devil…and well, the Devil came up and took him up on it. Things got better…then the Devil came to collect. The farmer, Jabez Stone, panicked and sought out Daniel Webster’s help. So they set up a trial with..well, Webster demanded a jury of Americans, current or past, and that he got:
If Jabez Stone had been sick with terror before, he was blind with terror now. For there was Walter Butler, the loyalist, who spread fire and horror through the Mohawk Valley in the times of the Revolution; and there was Simon Girty, the renegade, who saw white men burned at the stake and whooped with the Indians to see them burn. His eyes were green, like a catamount’s, and the stains on his hunting shirt did not come from the blood of the deer. King Philip was there, wild and proud as he had been in life, with the great gash in his head that gave him his death wound, and cruel Governor Dale, who broke men on the wheel. There was Morton of Merry Mount, who so vexed the Plymouth Colony, with his flushed, loose, handsome face and his hate of the godly. There was Teach, the bloody pirate, with his black beard curling on his breast. The Reverend John Smeet, with his strangler’s hands and his Geneva gown, walked as daintily as he had to the gallows. The red print of the rope was still around his neck, but he carried a perfumed handkerchief in one hand. One and all, they came into the room with the fires of hell still upon them, and the stranger named their names and their deeds as they came, till the tale of twelve was told. Yet the stranger had told the truth—they had all played a part in America.
And these jurors fed off of fury, outrage and hate. They more they saw, the more demon-like the got..the hotter their eyes glowed.
It got to Dan’l in the end, and he began to heat, like iron in the forge. When he got up to speak he was going to flay that stranger with every trick known to the law, and the judge and jury too. He didn’t care if it was contempt of court or what would happen to him for it. He didn’t care any more what happened to Jabez Stone. He just got madder and madder, thinking of what he’d say. And yet, curiously enough, the more he thought about it, the less he was able to arrange his speech in his mind. Till, finally, it was time for him to get up on his feet, and he did so, all ready to bust out with lightnings and denunciations. But before he started he looked over the judge and jury for a moment, such being his custom. And he noticed the glitter in their eyes was twice as strong as before, and they all leaned forward. Like hounds just before they get the fox, they looked, and the blue mist of evil in the room thickened as he watched them. Then he saw what he’d been about to do, and he wiped his forehead, as a man might who’s just escaped falling into a pit in the dark.
For it was him they’d come for, not only Jabez Stone. He read it in the glitter of their eyes and in the way the stranger hid his mouth with one hand. And if he fought them with their own weapons, he’d fall into their power; he knew that, though he couldn’t have told you how. It was his own anger and horror that burned in their eyes; and he’d have to wipe that out or the case was lost. He stood there for a moment, his black eyes burning like anthracite. And then he began to speak.
So, he had to find a different way to talk to them..to make them..more …human. And so..he did:
He started off in a low voice, though you could hear every word. They say he could call on the harps of the blessed when he chose. And this was just as simple and easy as a man could talk. But he didn’t start out by condemning or reviling. He was talking about the things that make a country a country, and a man a man.
And he began with the simple things that everybody’s known and felt—the freshness of a fine morning when you’re young, and the taste of food when you’re hungry, and the new day that’s every day when you’re a child. He took them up and he turned them in his hands. They were good things for any man. But without freedom, they sickened. And when he talked of those enslaved, and the sorrows of slavery, his voice got like a big bell. He talked of the early days of America and the men who had made those days. It wasn’t a spread-eagle speech, but he made you see it.
He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come.
And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.
And yes, he ended up winning the case, but paying a price. But that is the point: outrage will NOT move the Trump supporters, but perhaps the right approach might flip a FEW of them, in the key states..just enough to win the Electoral College. Blowing out Trump in California, New York and Illinois won’t really help.
Life of an old goat 