We escaped my birthday by riding down the coast on a sunny 45 degree day, stopping in favorite places for lattes and tea shopping, ending in Rockland just in time for the No Kings protest. Lots of noise makers and good cheer and singing. A group in the park singing Dona Nobis Pacem in rounds brought tears to our eyes. Then home through the Lincolnville hills where every turn and hilltop brought great foliage views. Speaking of peace, Bill McKibben says "this is the perfect moment for a revival of the peace movement—because it’s easier now than ever before to imagine the rapid transition to a more peaceful world. That's because all of a sudden we have an alternative to oil, and if you look around us, oil is the cause, the weapon, and the casualty of our current round of conflicts. More than at any point in our past, oil has become inextricably bound up in warfare, which means we could in short order move past it....The solar panel is the new peace symbol. Pass it on."

A week ago, a dozen of us combed through the defunct Quimby library and took away over 550 items. I concentrated on the American poetry section. Others targeted philosophy, children's books, or history. When have you ever been able to walk through a library and just take what you want? The new owners would like (after the fact) for us to itemize our takings which may not be possible. We will schedule another hunt because I seem to have missed the last part of the alphabet because I don't see any Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams.

Politically, we are in a very scary time with Trump and Putin both losing and increasingly desperate, and Putin using his kompromat to get Trump to turn against Ukraine or maybe trading him for election interference. Zelensky and Carney are the leaders of the free world. The time bewtween the election and the seating of the new congress is particularly dangerous. It is hard to escape the anxiety about it all. So we escaped into the woods on rail bikes.

Our library book club is reading these two books this month. The Murray book starts with the October 7 attacks which immediately gives away his bias. He sees Israel as a democracy surrounded by radical fanatics. You have to ignore a lot of real history to take that stance. Beinart's book has Gaza in the title and starts with a respectful call to fellow Jews to look at the stories they connect to holidays, and the parts of the stories they leave out. The stories perpetuate a narrative of victimhood and survival and ignore stories where the biblical Isralies committed massacres. He sees the safety of Jews and Palestinians as intertwined and points to examples like South Africa and Northern Ireland where people rejected supremacy and learned to live together. Over lunch at the MMA food court in Castine the other day, Marge R said much the same thing about how as children they were essentially lied to about the history of Israel. It's just like we were taught so much false history about the "settling" of this country. The truth is that both stories are about colonizers killing off the native population. The truth is that people and countries are capable of both good and evil, of being both perpetrator and victim.

I'm wondering if there is a deliberate political strategy to announcing a new horrific policy/deed/falsehood each day, so that public executions, buying diesel from Russia, ICE killings, election interference, etc wears down our sense of what is normal, desensitizes us to fascism. If the mid-terms don't give us both houses of congress with a change in leadership, democracy will be lost. As it is, it will take a generation to undo the damage. I voted early.

Markers: Empty Bowls year 2; a big idea long discussed becomes a possibility; dock-in ends summer.