“Earth mover, yurt maker, shaman, volunteer. Heat made worse by the time we don’t have today, to get to the river. But up here in the Vermont mountains, things ain’t really that bad. Someone’s holding a clipboard, while others haul materials, while I take stock of what’s in the cooler: Kombucha, beer, lime seltzer, organic lemonade. Those tasked with re-cutting a circle and chiseling boards by hand to correct a late night error are hard at work. It’s way past bug-thirty and there’s a palpable, communal urge to go faster, as twilight begins to touch the hills. Sent to charge batteries, I walk down to the plug at the house as I have countless times today, imagining a future bridge, spanning the muck I’m walking thru. Past frogs enamored with the wet, basking in a heat that is changing their world. I expect we’ll both survive the slings & arrows of miscreants, given our track record for survival. Those same twisted criminals who thought to rid themselves of free thinkers like JFK, tho few care to acknowledge that momentous watershed anymore. It’s a complicated landscape, and who can be bothered to invest the time to dig for truth or testimony, or wade into any morass that hasn’t been filtered by our mass media handlers. Ironically, I was sick with the mumps, then a common, harmless illness; it was 1963 and I was five, before health hysteria was “a thing”. Sitting on the pre-Ikea couch my parents most likely bought at the upscale “Contemporary Trends” in Ithaca NY, my little thumb in my mouth, I watched the coffin go by, in black and white. In those days, there were no remotes. A little five year old had to get off the couch, even when sick, to change the channel, using a manual television dial. I guess that’s why I can handle almost anything, today. Early on, I was groomed to absorb national tragedy and trickery in the context of my living room, thanks to the analog precursor to the future digital device. It would soon enough train me to adopt an “official” narrative, and disregard my own keen perceptions. And on this momentous day in 1963, every available channel out of a choice of maybe five showed nothing but this coffin rolling by in a gray motorcade, draped in the stars and stripes, gloomy, scary, & incomprehensible to childish eyes. Who killed JFK? This question is both obscure, and relevant, to those of us forced by some unconscious, intuitive, and cognitive dissonance to undertake an unpleasant effort to update our understanding of US history and our own current reality. Did you think your education was at its pinnacle when you graduated college? That you could disconnect and go to sleep once you bought a piece of land, or inherited one, and became settled, and financially comfortable? Well, I weaseled my way into land ownership, as a twenty-something, with no family money or support. I married into it, and then paid a heavy price for it. Maybe you came to feel totally at home with progressive group-think, a slam dunk “no-brainer” from your perspective, aligned with science or whoever was your sacred cow mainstream personality. You believed. Because humans can move mountains, put up yurts in tract-less corners of the wilderness, save drowning butterflies, and do many fine things. Is it any surprise that those fighting hardest to force others to “unify” behind a belief system that mandates chemical health solutions, that these folks are the new brown shirts? Think about it and think about all the times you fought, no demanded, my body, my choice.”
