…..to shut ‘er down. For awhile, anyway.

I almost always write about what’s on my mind and, usually, my mind is full of stuff. I am OTG, after all. I am also political. A smidge philosophical, too, now and then. I am married to an Amazon who continues to amaze, amuse and assist. Whales swim by my front door. And we are all pretty much into the shallow end of the pool on Climate Change so that, too, portends more fodder for the writer’s mill……….but, well, the old Hamster wheel in my head has inexplicably slowed. I am not thinkin’ as much these days. Not about anything. Not really. Just not feeling it, ya know?

The joke that is ‘our government’ is not worth even listening too, let alone wasting time thinking about. The clown show that is ‘Merican politics actually makes Canada seem sane. And the madness is just growing. But it is all so crazy everywhere I can’t work up a logical opinion or even suggest a path forward. I see chaos, not patterns. And there is no big picture view when there is only chaos.

And the chaos is expanding too. As they say, “you can’t make this stuff up!” , so I can’t even project or guess what might happen next. It is all way too insane to contemplate anymore. Put bluntly; it is crazy-making. My brain says, “Quit!”

So, I am. I am done here. At least for the foreseeable future. All seven of you are very special to me. I made some great friends on this blog. Please write if you want. But, for now, I am stepping back to watch the trainwreck unfold as it will.

I am writing this blog to the background melodic tones of a mighty Honda 2800 working its little alternator out.  We need the power.  It’s only 2:00 pm and thunder is following lightning all across the sky.  It is ‘wintery’ out there.  Dark-ish.  Dreadful. 2:00 in afternoon and not a shred of sunshine. We need the light.  Batteries need the juice. 

Water levels are up, tho.

Sal and I finished up what we could the other day on the warm room under the house.  I ran out of adhesive for the insulation board so it is still partially undone.  But that’s OK.  One more tube of goo and we are finished with that chore….mostly….

…..from one chore always comes many more little ones. 

This almost-completed large chore required a re-think on the ‘warming’ source.  My 8Kw diesel heater is just too much.  So, I got out my three old-school Japanese Kerosene heaters and had a go at them.  They are as old as I am. One works pretty well and the other two just need wick trimmings and a bit of fiddling.  Kerosene might help. I am pretty sure I could make them all work.  But even one is pretty hot for that little space. 

Then I remembered my old oil lanterns.  I have eight of them.  Four were from our living-on-sailboats days.  Lovely little units.  All on gimbals.  So, I got ‘em out, trimmed their little wicks and set ‘em on fire.  Interesting.  I would need two, maybe three of them to get to the level of warm I would want.   

So, one source is too big, one is almost just right (but old) and the last option is too little.  There is more to be done on this.  And this is the stuff of living OTG. 

I am reporting in mostly because the weather shifted quite significantly this past week.  I know it is mid-October and it is supposed to do that but, well, it really feels like winter is settling in rather dramatically.  The wind, high seas, rain, storms and cold kinda reinforce that feeling.  The dogs aren’t happy about it either.  

However, not all is dark.  One ol’ buddy from around these here parts decided this year to embrace the RV life and he just set out for points south in his old MoHo.  He is brand new to the game.  And he is excited. This will be an adventure for him.  Sal and I have RV’d since we got together 53 years ago.  It’s not new to us.  But all that fun is likely over for us now.  We aren’t drawn to the US anymore and we have been all over there, Canada and Mexico several times.  We think our RV’ing days are pretty much done.

Maybe our traveling days are pretty much over…?   

I kinda, almost, ruled out airports a few years ago.  Better that I should rule out airports than they end up ruling out me – and that latter event was shaping up to be inevitable. I hate them and, it was seemingly becoming a mutual feeling.  It’s mostly me. I have a problem with authority figures, especially when they exercise their authority and I tend to get extra vexed when they ‘power trip’ over my shampoo bottle or fountain pen.   I really should get therapy…..

…in the meantime, I stopped booking flights.  But that is still open….somewhat….we’ll see….

A short word of encouragement to some readers having a hard time right now. Like the coming winter, it will pass.

A reader recently ripped me a new orifice. “Building the room without insulation is ill advised. In fact, I explicitly advised the opposite. You have to listen to the experts and, in this case, I am the expert!” Then he took the glass of wine from my hand and settled into having a really nice Sal-prepared meal complete with chocolate cheesecake. Such hubris was warranted, however. He was leaving the next day for four months down south.

Still, as he claimed, he was right. I was wrong. Tomorrow I start insulating the little room.

One way in which he was especially right was that an insulated room requires so much less heat. As it was, I had an 8kw diesel heater ‘warming’ a space that could only accommodate two cords of wood. My heating apparatus was overkill. By adding insulation, a large candle will keep the space warm.

It is so good to have such considerate friends.

But that is not today’s blog. Todays blog is: trouble comes in threes. I discovered this weird phenomena sailing. If I failed to put something away properly such as a line or a fender, inevitably that fender would soon wrap around a sheet (rope to control the sail) when I needed to tack (change direction while under sail). Now I have the boat with a sail on the wrong side and no way of fixing it because I am not properly under power in such a situation (while under sail, the motor is off). So, that is two things wrong. Typically one has to tack when one has sailed close to a place one does not want to hit so proximity to being the main part of a shipwreck is imminent. Voila! Trouble comes in threes.

My point is that one mistake is often just an inconvenience. You stop, fix it and carry on. Two mistakes is an embarrassment. The first mistake caused or was aggravated by the second mistake which ended up causing a problem larger than the actual sum of the mistakes. Gobs of time are now required to fix the botch up. But, if like most people, we can ignore the first two for awhile, that is often the opportunity for mistake number three to come along and bring the whole house of procrastination down. I have learned the hard way to stop and fix error number 1.

The examples of the error-of-threes are everywhere. The election of Trump caused the creation of MAGA, and that caused division in the country and the list of triumvirate trouble like that is all too common throughout history. Hell, the examples of triumvirate trouble is rampant in families every day.

The point is: we all make errors. And we don’t always fix the first error (especially if no one notices it). And we all have histories of dealing with the second or next trouble exacerbated by the flaw that was the first. And making it ripe for catastrophe should a third one come along at just the right time. That is the way of things.

What bothers me right now is that more and more it is being revealed that we are at least two errors deep into one helluva lotta trouble from Climate change to the economy, from Hamas to Israel, from the US government to our relationship with China. In Canada, for God’s sake, we have managed to annoy Russia, China and India just for starters.

We are knee deep in two’s and threes.

I guess what I am saying is we have so many troubled twos and threes, we have a new phenomena. The Tsunamis of threes. We do not have just one catastrophe from three things going wrong, we do not just have three times the things going wrong to double the problem but we seem to have three times the problem applied to many, many areas. Our troubles are 3 carried to the 33rd power.

Confusion cubed.

….under the house.

Imagine you built a house (level) on a 30 degree slope? That means that the front of the house is elevated on legs/piers, stilts/posts and the back of the dwelling is almost at ground level. That is what we have and the height difference is about 20 feet. The front deck is 20 feet off the ground. That also means that, as you go back up the slope (under the house), the floor of the house is slowly encroaching on your headroom as you go. By the half-way point, there is about eight feet of headroom but five more feet up and it is six feet and another foot up, I bump my head. From there on, everything is done bent over.

Our water system is also on the rock. The cisterns sit on the rock, the pipe line to the house sits on the rock and the plumbing pumps and such are built on a shelf under the house – just above the rock. It’s exposed. Of course, I did things over the years to keep it all from freezing and that has mostly worked. But not always. We’ve had more than a few pumps and ball valves for instance. There have been a few winters where the only thing to do was to drain the system, use pre-filled water totes and simply wait out the typical one, maybe two week freeze. That gets to be a pain as you get older.

Well, everything gets to be a pain as you get older but some things I can make better. Not all my plumbing can be fixed but house plumbing is something I still control. And, after some hesitation, putting all that of that system (the vulnerable stuff) in an enclosed heated space made the most sense.

Well, in theory it did. But OMG, working under the house on a slope and building a mouse-proof, warm room is a bit of a task. It was hard to make Sally do it.

I’m joking (kinda). I built the room but there were quite a few times when the space was tight and the yoga was lacking. Sal did a lot of the ‘tight’ work. She is also very fastidious when it comes to mouse-proofing so Sal was essential.

We are 3/4s done. The room is built. The machinery moved (always requiring fixes as you go). It is mostly mouse-proofed. I just have to add the heater. It does not need to be a fancy, modern, blah, blah, blah piece of machinery…any heat source will do and I only need it for say, two weeks.

But I got carried away. I bought a Chinese Webasto knock-off. They are diesel-fired heat exchangers that were and are popular with truckers, van-living nomads and, oddly, a lot of OTG’ers. Probably same reason. “I can afford two weeks of diesel heat to get through the worst part. My wood stove will serve the rest of the time.” They are cheap, simple, very efficient, safe and essentially portable. Win-win-kinda. I bought an 8Kw heater. I think that makes about 20,000 btus. It would heat 400 sft in freezing weather quite easily.

I have 48 square feet and it is only four feet high. Basically the space of two cords of wood.

If I had insulated the room, it would be way, way too much but I did not. But it is still too much. I have a small kerosene heater that will likely do the job. I am gonna have to test it all out before it is needed. I will probably go with the diesel and let the room get really warm….and maybe duct some of that extra heat to the house…I dunno…I am sure it is a science of some kind (Thermodynamics?) but I am more inclined to wing it, see how it works, make some changes and check it again. That’s my style.

Some time ago (3 or so months?) I wrote that Trump was done. Toast. Over. I opined that he might even go to jail (altho I suspected that it would only be house arrest). There was something in the air, some tone in the media, some dramatic DOJ actions together with some quiet conversions of a few GOP members that made that prediction seem correct.

And I am sticking with it………..but kinda holding my breath.

There was a recent poll in the Wall Street Journal, no less, reporting that Biden and Trump were tied. TIED!!!???? Yes, even the WSJ is saying the poll was flawed but that does not erase the fact that many preferred Trump to Biden. There shouldn’t be any!

That is not only insane and beyond belief, it is also scary and suggests that half the 340M people in the USA are as mad as meth heads (the other half are likely meth heads). The scary part, of course, is having Trump in the White House again but equally as frightening is the empowerment that will give the MAGA nut-bars. The US will descend into chaos. Well, even MORE chaos than it is already. Should that all happen, then getting out will mean leaving the continent and relocating to Antarctica. If you can find someplace to rent down there.

Trump is now calling Gen Mark Milley a traitor. Gen Milley kept Donald from doing something stupid as best he could and had a group of sane people watching the nuclear football and keeping other leaders properly informed. Milley was yet another ‘adult in the room’ keeping the Giant Orange baby in line. Now that the General has come out and said as much, Trump is calling for his execution. And some doofus GOP rep from some loony state echoed it. US government top-positioned elected and governing people in congress calling for the head of the Joint Chiefs.

And every GOP slimer from Mike Pence to Nikki Haley, from Kevin McCarthy to Ted Cruz remain silent. Not one (as of this writing) has condemned Paul Gosar (R-Ar) for threatening the General and one GOP hopeful, Noah Malegeri (R-Nev) has also called for Milley’s head.

Of course, the ever-optimistic simply write this kind of madness off to ‘crazy town’ (the latest new phrase) and, of course, they are called to expand crazy town’s limits with Loren Bobert vaping in a theatre, getting it on with her date-after-recent divorce in full public view and generally showing the world that she is an idiot. They have to make such allowances for Ron DeSantis and George Santos as well. Marjorie Taylor Green. Tommy Tuberville. Matt Gaetz. And on and on the list grows and on and on the Crazy-town city limits expand.

So, I am still pretty sure that Trump is done but, damn, Crazy-town city limits is expanding like a virus.

The main title of this blog suggests off-the-grid content and I try to still do some of that when it jumps out at me. You know, like a rescue-at-sea, wildlife sightings, major projects. What is interesting to me is that I have now incorporated regular OTG-ing so much into my day that I do not even notice it as different enough to write about anymore. For example: yesterday, I serviced three ‘work’ engines (all gensets) and went so far as to clean a carb, ‘stabilize’ the gas and, of course, change the oil in all three. No biggy. NOT news.

We also pulled the 14 foot chimney, cleaned it out (outside), reassembled it and changed the bricks inside the woodstove. Again, no biggy. NOT news. I also got a new, small welder and made up a welders table and rearranged all the ‘stuff’ in the little ‘new’ shed to accommodate all that.

Today, some friends come out for a visit and I pick them up in the boat and bring ’em over, feed ’em and, later on, load ’em up and take ’em back. On Monday, Sal goes over to the neighbouring island and picks up 8 sheets of ply and two sheets of cement board – because I have to enclose the plumbing into an under-the-house, warm-ish plumbing room to keep it from freezing in a cold winter (yes, should have been done a long time ago).

So, my point is that we are still living OTG and, compared to living urban, it is really very physical and different. There should be blog news. Especially when we are both in our 70’s. On the other hand, we’ve been doing this for twenty years now and it seems ‘normal’ to us. It no longer feels ‘normal’ to live in the city. It feels weird to go there. It feels ABNORMAL.

I won’t bore you with all the different urban rant-topics regarding traffic and such. I’ll just point out that there is a shift in one’s mental constructs, one’s subconscious thoughts and feelings, one’s perspective on well, just about everything that just comes with time spent being different than we used to be…..and that feeling is (ironically) ‘we are NOT ‘different’ anymore. We are normal HERE. We are mainstream, average OTG folks. THIS IS US NOW!

This minor epiphany came about because my daughter is still visiting and pursuing her self appointed mission to continue ‘learning about living out here’. Every day she asks, “So, what are we doing today?”

And I respond with, “Nothing much and then list a few chores that, in retrospect, sound like NASA projects or ‘Mountain man’ adventures. “We’ll adjust the solar panels to better capture the winter sun. We’ll get some of the boards up the hill. I’ll order a fill up (propane and gasoline) from the barge. Maybe do some dog-clipping. Maybe replace a couple of deck boards. We still have two logs on the beach. So maybe that…..”

I dunno…maybe this blog isn’t resonating with you….I dunno…it is just that we are now so different it feels like normal to us and it takes seeing it all through my daughter’s eyes to realize how much different we are compared to what we were.

OK. I’ll stop with the introspection and go back to politics soon…..

Please accept that we have never overly promoted OTG-ing to our family and friends as a TEOTWAWKI response, a SHTF emergency plan. But we have promoted the lifestyle. We have emphasized nature, health, physical work, skill-building, personal growth and the like. Of course, The Zombie Apocalypse gets thrown around and even discussed a bit but fear is not the OTG message, health and happiness is.

Anyway…my son and my daughter have recently visited. Again. Not a surprise – they come a few times every year. But it is not easy for them. One comes from another province, the other has a family a few hundred miles away. They both work full-time jobs altho my daughter works for herself and is a digital nomad-of-sorts. Still, time is tight for them – but they came again a week ago. “Hey, Dad! We’re coming up in a week or so. Both of us. Together!!”

My daughter’s new-found agenda, it seems, is to ‘learn’ how to live off-the-grid. “Like, what do you do, really? Other than chop wood? And, like, can I do it? Could you write up a manual?” My son’s even newer agenda is to suss out the the general area, the topography, the supplies, the tools. “Hey, dad, just how much water do you need to gather and how does that work? And what do you do when it all freezes up? Oh, yeah, just how much food do you keep on hand…you know, like, for emergencies?”

What they are really saying is: “When we inherit the empire, what needs doing and, if we have to come here in an emergency, what should we bring?”

They are now WOKE OTG-style. Something about our OTG-ness has clicked with them and, coincidentally, it seems to have occurred to them both at much the time. Seems they have been talking.

Now, do not get me wrong….my kids are hugely proud of what we have done and still do and they have been parent-proud since we started. (‘But it was a bit weird…..‘). They even kinda brag about their parents…not me so much as Sal but still, both of us. And it is not so much a pride-in-the-parent thing as it is a pride of lifestyle choice and a bit about the skills we have developed. Septuagenarian Sal continues to impress with her skills, stamina, strength and cooking. The simple fact that I am not yet doddering and can still move a few heavy things around is now a star on my page. “Hey, dad is not quite as stupid and misguided as we thought….maybe…”

But something clicked in the last year….something ‘woke them up’. Twasn’t us. Now they see OTG as a worthy goal, not an eccentricity. Now they are embracing it. They are anticipating it. They are – in a way – EXPECTING it! And they got there on their own.

“So, guys. I am pleased that you are both embracing this way of life and I am just as pleased that you are planning on your inheriting it all. That’s good. I am even more pleased that you are aware that you will need to expand your skill set and, eventually, will need to improve and expand the empire. It kinda looks like you are planning and getting into the ‘prepping mindset’. Is that right? Are you guys planning your summer cabin or are you beginning ‘OTG preppers’? And, if going OTG is true, what prompted this enlightenment? Are you seeing something more threatening than I am seeing? Do you know something I do not? Are you sensing something? What is prompting this renewed interest?”

The answer might surprise you in it’s nothingness……“Nothing, really, dad. I mean, the world is clearly going completely bonkers but there is no one thing that has spurred this. It’s more of a growing preference for this lifestyle over the city. I like ‘Gotham’ but I find myself liking being out here more. I hate the traffic and the rat race too. But no real specific influence, no real series of events, nothing really prompting it….maybe a bit of climate change threat, I guess, but climate will impact us all. I dunno…..we’re both around 40….maybe we are getting old?”

Getting old? I don’t think so. Getting smart, maybe.

….when you think you have heard it all. Seen it all. Done it all. Of course, you have NOT, not in anyway can one person experience it all, but you can FEEL as if you have. That feeling must be some kind of Exposure Fatigue. Been there. Done that. Material goods just keep being marketed in your face. The news cycle seems to be on a repeat loop, politicians seem to be clones of themselves, economics remains the same kinda giant mystery and human tragedies play out much the same every day…like rain in Prince Rupert. “Geez, didn’t I read about that just last week?”

My father, as he lay dying, said he felt that way. He then pulled his own Oxygen mask off his face and said, (his last words) “Enough is enough.” At my age now, I have had more than a few contemporaries say virtually the same thing by availing themselves of the MAID alternative. Sometimes enough is enough.

I am nowhere near having had enough myself, by the way, but I am very near to having had too much more of the same ol’ crap. And I am feeling that.

In literature, story-telling, movies, they say there are just seven basic plots and every story is just a variation on one of them. I am in no position to disagree with that but I have to point out that the news doesn’t feel like there are even 7 different story-lines being told. It feels like less. It is starting to feel like ‘same ol’, same ol’ every day. Even when it starts out as ‘new’….

Case in point (HUGELY) is Trump. The con man who never shuts up. The story that never ends. If there is an actual and ironic twist in the anti-legend of Trump it is that it is turning out that he really WAS good for business. The rise and fall of Donald Trump has earned pundits and lawyers, TV celebs and government officials gazillions of dollars and lifetimes of attention. Newspapers have risen from the dead. Thousands of careers and reputations have also risen and fallen. You-Tube has exploded. Capitalism turned that great Orange Pimple into an industry and the media (all forms) fed off him like flesh-eating disease for almost a decade now…..well, it will be more than a decade before the story winds down – if it ever does.

Truly, this is the most bloviated (empty and vacuous as it is) story ever told (on the dark side, anyway.)

There is an element to Trump’s story and, for that matter, all political-leaders story’s that is now viewed quite a bit differently for me. And that is: the utter futility of entrusting your life and well-being to the ‘chosen one’, their ‘party/gang/cartel’ or even the larger but totally parasitic ‘system’ they figure-head. In selfish fools and corruption we trust.

We are blessed in Canada more than most other people on earth but the reason (I am currently thinking) we are so lucky is that we have a lot of empty space in which to roam. A Canadian can ‘get lost’. We can check out and never have to check back in. Of course, practically speaking, that is a silly premise because we all need a society to support us in some ways but it FEELS like I can get out. It FEELS like I am partially out. It feels as if I can get further out NOW.

That feeling is not shared by most people on the planet.

To a large extent freedom is really just possessing a feeling, an attitude, a sense of options. And I feel as if I still have that. I do not feel trapped. I am not chained or incarcerated. I could, if I wanted to, even leave our house and land and just go. Age and experience has put a perspective, a context, an attitude to most material assets and things. I still kinda want (and need) a few assets and things but I am more and more freed from that every day. I do not shop much anymore. I do not dream of owning a widget anymore, nor even an AWD electric hybrid widget-mobile. All that stuff now feels like weight and burden that a free man, ready to break out, doesn’t need.

If you don’t need much, if you don’t feel an artificial allegiance to a dear leader or even a country, if you do not feel like umbilicals and cobwebs are all over you and, if you get intimations of your limited remaining time on this earth, you might be surprised to experience that as real freedom.

I am.

……….a full woodshed? A full larder? I dunno. I mean, I never thought I’d define happiness the way I do nowadays. Now, it’s all in the little things. At this stage in my life, I am happy and grateful for the most mundane, benign, laid-back vanilla lifestyle ever. Hell, I even like vanilla ice cream now (when living OTG any ice cream is extremely well received).

Here’s my typical day (sans the still-too-frequent tool-caused bloodletting): I get up at 7:00. Usually the dogs make a noise first but, if they do not, I have been sufficiently trained to the point that I wake and give them their breakfast at the right time. Then I shower and have a cuppa. Sal is right behind me and sometimes five or ten minutes ahead. Both of us are awake and clean and sipping coffee or tea by 7:30.

But then the frenetic pace slows right down. We each get on the ‘puter and do ‘puter stuff til 9:30. No energy needed or expended. In effect, we have only moved from the bed to the chair. But then, hoo boy! All hell breaks loose and we have breakfast (be still, my beating heart!). And we plan the day…………..

……..the day starts at noon.

The last ten or so days it has been mostly just getting in the firewood. Hunting, towing, sorting, cutting, hauling up the cliff, cutting into rounds, wheelbarrowing said rounds to the splitter and then splitting and stacking until the woodshed is filled. This year, we panicked a bit and gathered a few more logs than we need and so we have half-a-second year to drag and store on racks as well. But that is a good thing. We still have a couple more days of splitting and stacking and, of course, all the attendant prep and clean-up, chainsaw maintenance and such. But we are in fine shape…..heat-wise. Both of us ache and stoop a bit more than usual.

By four p.m, we are pretty much done for the day. I go pour wine. Sal always has something extra to do til 4:30 and so I maybe try trimming a patch of dog (one good square foot of Gus at a time), put away some tools or otherwise waste a half hour. At 4:30 we sit on the deck and drink wine. By 5:30, Sal is cooking dinner….or I am cooking dinner…or, more usually, we are cooking dinner together. By 6:30 the dishes are done and, once again, our hectic pace subsides. We can relax.

Of course, the day includes a myriad of other miscellaneous, short term diversions from the main chore but, generally speaking, we do one half-day BIG job and a dozen five minute to-do-list tasks, plus a phone call or whatever but that’s basically it. Off the grid living Dave and Sally style.

Please note the not-mentioned commute, the meetings NOT had, the appointments not made, the projects-for-others not due. No shopping, no Starbucks, no gym. Please note the predominantly selfish, private, independent nature of it all.

If it weren’t for the demands of the damn dogs, eh?

To have or have not? It seems (from studies) that there are 38 separate factors that are involved in creating the stage for a Civil War. And it takes no kind of genius to accurately guess at many of them. Inequality, corruption, persecution, poverty, ideology, etc. But, according to B.F. Walters, a three decades-long expert in Civil Wars, there are only two main REAL factors to worry about in the short term: celebrity/identity/ethnic/racist politics (and) in a weak or eroded democracy termed an ‘anocracy’. (Somewhere between an autocracy and a democracy – in most instances, a corrupt democracy).

In other words: democracy has a better chance when voting is ideologically driven rather than when focused on a cult-personality or a fear/hatred. Furthermore, voting needs to be universal, trusted and influential. The people need to see that their vote counts.

The US currently qualifies so highly in those two main areas and many of the 36 lesser ones that their democracy has been downgraded by Democracy Watch three times since 2016. The USA is, by expert opinion, on the verge.

Apparently, a likely civil war scenario can be ‘walked back from the edge’. Ms Walter states that, in the short term, firstly, media has to be regulated. NOT censored. The difference she cites is that anyone should be able to say anything they want in a real, free-speech democracy but that the media (or shadow media actors) should NOT be employing algorithms to artificially amp up one message or another. Russia and China used altering social media algorithms to assist Trump get elected. Our social media is acting or being used as foreign propaganda.

Secondly, business has to become more ‘people focused’ and be less profit focused. Business is currently the missing ally with government in the equation for a stable and healthy democracy.

Thirdly, we as a population/society have to accept inevitable sociological changes and the single-most resistant segment of the population to those changes are older white men and women. Where older white men and women used to enjoy higher status and some kinds of privilege, today they do not. Furthermore, whites as a group, will be in the minority sometime soon. Walters believes it will be sooner rather than later because of climate change migration. She also states that a lot of (vague) anger drives militias, addictions, homelessness, mass shootings and the increasingly marginalized and white men are the ones who have fallen the fastest and the farthest. See the January 6th crowd.

For the record: B. F. Walters is a white woman.

I tend to agree with her….mostly. I am not in the least aggravated by skin colour, religion or most cultures. And I grew up so poor that privilege and status are not something I aspire to (I am already doing great for trailer trash). But, like every white male, I have seen ‘white-male-ism’ somewhat maligned and increasingly blamed for just about everything. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it does indicate a lower social status than before. Nobody likes change if it is for the (self perceived) worse. So, I can almost understand the hill-billy Bubba coal miner getting angry and shootin’ up the local Walmart. I, too, am a grouchy old man, after all. I just don’t blame anyone is all. Don’t wanna shoot anyone. If foreigners come, that is OK by me.

Mostly. I really do not want the Bloods and Crips to move in next door. Or the Hell’s Angels. I do think (probably erroneously) that the Russian culture is more than a bit scary at times. And I confess to keeping a watchful eye when visiting a 3rd world country with a lot of unemployed, impoverished, rough-looking young men carrying guns. Like, Haiti might put me on edge, for instance. I ain’t Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm. Still, I can honestly say that I can be and will be friends with anyone who is pleasant and trying their best to be a good Canuck. We could use a few more good guys around.

But I digress….the point is that US democracy is under some real threat. The point is that change is coming. The point is the two main ingredients for a US civil war are present and B.F. Walters is raising the alarm.

How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them is a book by Barbara F. Walter, published in 2022