• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Stephen Altschuler

thoughts on environment, politics, health, life issues

  • Home
  • Stephen Altschuler
  • Blog
  • Mindfulness Images
  • Mindfulness
  • Mindful Nature Connection
  • Mindful Golf
  • All Books

Archives for March 2017

Saving Our Democracy

March 17, 2017 by Stephen AltschulerLeave a Comment

Briefly stated, get involved. The keyword for a strong, active democracy is involvement. When the citizenry becomes lazy and complacent, when it becomes politically silent, when it takes its freedoms and liberties for granted, assuming they are written in stone, that citizenry becomes vulnerable to any strongman/autocrat who comes along spewing lies about how the democracy is working. That strongman first creates fear through false facts and fake news and then purports to fix the false facts that aren’t really facts. It was the stock and trade of snake oil salesmen who roamed the American countryside in previous centuries, bilking people of their hard earned cash while lining their own pockets with the spoils of a gullible public.

So a crucial element of involvement, is to tear open the envelope of fear and false facts, and determine, truly, which are true. This is no easy task. There are numerable purveyors of news out there, all vying for attention with sometime questionable headlines and content. There is the Internet, unfettered and unregulated, with a scant few checking on its so-called facts and assertions and accusations. It’s like entering a casino and trying to figure out which slot machine will deliver the next jackpot. The machines are often rigged to deliver an occasional winner, just to keep the player in his or her seat plugging in quarters and dollars as the casino owners sit smugly in their high lairs smiling the smiles of contented greed and satisfaction at their cleverness.

Of course slot machine analysis is a futile exercise. You will ultimately lose because only luck will determine when that next jackpot will come up. Objective research is futile. But with the lies of politicians, which are paraded unabashedly as truths, you may be able to determine which are valid and which are bloviated bull. Performing that analysis is the challenge of every [Read more…] about Saving Our Democracy

Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged With: 1984, Bannon, Barack Obama, BBC, birther, danger to democracy, Dilbert, Fox News, Indivisible guide, Michael Moore, Mitch McConnell, New York Times, Obamacare, PBS, Rush Limbaugh, special prosecutor, Tea Party, Trump, Washington Post

March, 1978

March 14, 2017 by Stephen Altschuler2 Comments

With the coming of March, my mind languished either in the future, dreaming of blossoming leaves and shoots of peas and wild trillium on the woodland floor, or in the past, licking my wounds of the winter and marveling that I made it through in pretty good shape. March epitomized such thinking. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Julius Caesar got so caught up in the reveries of spring that he thought Brutus was coming by to borrow a cup of sugar.

So instead of being beware of the Ides of March, I tried to be aware of March’s subtle yet wondrous transitions. As November cowered at the gateway of the long, droning winter—a kind of Charon at the river Styx—March mirrored Icarus, rising high toward the spring sun, too confident, until its waxed wings melted and it plummeted to earth as a fresh winter storm or cold spell—a plunge that caught me and my wood supply off guard. “I’ve got more than enough wood,” I said to myself at the beginning of the month. But each day of sub-freezing, windswept, and sometimes snowy weather withered my pile dangerously low.

In New Hampshire, folks branded March a winter month, yet the lifeblood of spring began to flow. As the days warmed, the maple sap rose in the awakening trees. The snow cover, which seemed as if it would last until June, began to recede—slow, recalcitrant. A day with the temperature in the fifties, the next, winter again—a storm, a cold penetrating wind, made even colder by the brief offerings of warmth and the way it tricked the mind into complacence. Yet the signs accented the coming change—the longer days, the copious flow of maple sap, and the way that sap turned milky when the buds were pregnant with leaf blossoms.

The forest seemed to bristle with more activity. Small animals, as evidenced by their tracks, crisscrossed, like busy shoppers, from tree to tree. More birds paused from their intense business of winter survival to sing a few notes of springtime exultation. March was the herald of salvation for the forest. All around, trees stood winter-weary, rocked and buffeted and battered by the three furies: December, January, and February.

Some were down and gone, sacrifices to the nature spirits. Others stood scarred and limbless, creaking Waltzing Matilda as the cold March winds bullied them, emulating the power of January—a power forever denied March by the higher and longer course of the sun. The equinox neared, and the thought of it sustained me through this ephemeral late winter. For, like the trees, my veneer had been worn thin by violent winter winds and weather.

Yet also like the majority of trees, my core was intact and strengthened by this winter experienced and survived. I emerged from the battle triumphant and, in the struggling, knew more of me—my resilience, my fears, my capacities, my failings. Yet, as my internal conflict of opposites continued, March lingered incomplete, unfinished, a Panmunjom among months. Love, hate, open, closed, sad, joy, heart, head, fear, peace—opposites that March reflected.

For like no other month, March signaled an end and a beginning. It was the death of winter and the conception of spring. It was a depleted woodpile and a plan for the garden. In March thoughts turned away from the tempered-steel winter toward the butterfly spring. Yet March bent like an apple branch, springy and whippy, then snapped—an exaggerated blast of cold and storm if you let your mind get too far ahead.

But on the ends of the windblown branches of this wild month, buds clung poised and ready to pirouette when the curtain rose. And with March, the crowd stirred and the show began.

New Ipswich, New Hampshire

copyright Stephen Altschuler 2017

First appeared in Sacred Paths and Muddy Places (Stillpoint Publishing, Walpole NH, 1993)

Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged With: March, New Hampshire, snow cover, spring, winter, wood pile

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Make a Donation

A donation, either one-time or monthly, would be greatly appreciated to help keep this blog going. To date, I've accepted no advertising. Thanks so much for your consideration and generosity.

Recent Posts

  • Breakable News Special Report
  • Left wing anarchists?
  • How we got into the bind we are in; and how to get out of it
  • I am Deeply Concerned…about QAnon
  • Breakable News Dives into the Deep State

Recent Comments

  • Stephen Altschuler on Trump Needs to be Arrested and Charged with Treason, Sedition,and Inciting to Riot
  • Stephen Altschuler on Trump Needs to be Arrested and Charged with Treason, Sedition,and Inciting to Riot
  • Stephen Altschuler on Trump Needs to be Arrested and Charged with Treason, Sedition,and Inciting to Riot
  • cinsing on Trump Needs to be Arrested and Charged with Treason, Sedition,and Inciting to Riot
  • Claudia Bansfield on Trump Needs to be Arrested and Charged with Treason, Sedition,and Inciting to Riot

Archives

  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • February 2018
  • December 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • March 2017

Categories

  • 2018 election
  • Animal Rights
  • democracy
  • Donald Trump
  • Events
  • Hiking
  • Human nature
  • mindfulness
  • Nuclear War
  • Paul Ryan
  • Trump
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2021 · Author Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in