2025 Life Logs, Day 56: Upper Cape Indivisible Meeting
Date: Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Weather: Another Beautiful Day, Even Warmer; High Temp 50, Low 35 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

After a quiet day at home and then picking Ollie up from school and taking him to his weekly saxophone lesson, tonight I went to an Upper Cape Indivisible meeting here in Falmouth. “Indivisible, a grassroots movement, mobilizes individuals and groups to defend democracy and tackle systems of power. With a focus on unity and shared leadership, Indivisible combines local constituent pressure with national campaigns, working both within and outside established systems.” Last week, I wrote about attending a local Indivisible ‘We Choose to Fight’ gathering on Presidents’ Day and about tuning into their weekly Zoom last Thursday. So, tonight I decided it was time to find out more about the local chapter. There are thousands of chapters nationally, and tonight the organizers were very pleased to see so many attending for the first time. The movement is growing. And people at the local, state, and national level out there protesting is powerful.

When I got home, I watched The Rachel Maddow show and I heard her say that all of the public pressure is not yet changing the song, but it is changing a few notes. She interviewed Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible tonight and he said the same thing. More public pressure is needed to keep the Republican budget bill from passing in the Senate. If it is not stopped, people’s health care is going to be compromised severely. So, get out there and make your voice heard before it is too late. What can you do?

On February 28 (this Friday) there is a national general strike. No shopping, no purchasing gasoline, no fast food, and if you must purchase, do it locally with cash. No credit cards.

Locally, there are two upcoming opportunities. On Tuesday, March 4 at noon in Hyannis at the traffic circle, there is a ‘Protest the Coup’ event.

And in Woods Hole on Saturday, March 7 at noon, there is a Stand Up for Science event.

Otherwise, I just enjoyed another beautiful day with a high temp of 50 degrees F. I don’t know how long it has been since it was this warm, but it sure felt great!

2025 Life Logs, Day 55: Field Trip to Mary Baker Eddy House
Date: Monday, February 24, 2025
Weather: Beautiful Day, Warming; High Temp 41, Low 37 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Who was Mary Baker Eddy? And why did our field trip group go to tour one of her homes? Mary Baker was born on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire in 1821. She was an American religious leader, Christian healer, and author, who in 1879 founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, the Mother Church of the Christian Science movement in Boston, Massachusetts. She also founded The Christian Science Monitor in 1908, and three religious magazines and published numerous books. Eddy’s most important publication was Science and Health. She was also the author of 16 other titles that are still in print today. But the reason for the trip was not centered on her accomplishments. We went to tour the home she lived in during her last three years. It is a 3-story home at 400 Beacon Street in Chestnut Hill on the edge of Boston.

The home was built in around 1880, but was purchased an renovated by Mary Baker Eddy in 1908. After her death in 1910, her staff was allowed to live in it until their deaths. It then sat empty for almost a hundred years and was restored true to its 1908 status. Our docent-led two- and half-hour tour was fabulous. It was a long tour, but at the end we had more and more questions. The time literally flew by. The story of restoring the house with wallpaper and carpeting and furniture as true to the original as possible was truly fascinating. My favorite room was her office. As I sat in that room, I tried to picture this diminutive woman in her late-80’s sitting at that desk creating the Christian Science Monitor. She must have been quite the woman.

2025 Life Logs, Day 54: In the Kitchen
Date: Sunday, February 23, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny and Warmer; High Temp 40, Low 27 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

I spent a great deal of my time in the kitchen today, but the time spent outside was much more civil. There was some wind early, but it lessened a bit as the day went on. And the temperature went up to 40 degrees F this afternoon. And when I checked the forecast, it looks like we have more days with temps around coming up 40 this week.

Heather and family headed home today after their week of snowboarding and skiing fun in Vermont. I had offered to have dinner ready for them when they got home tonight, so part of my day was spent getting that ready. And then I remembered that tomorrow night is Select Board and Health Board. In Heather and Jed’s absence on the Monday nights they both have meetings, I have been getting dinner for the boys. I will be on an all day field trip to Boston tomorrow, so I fixed tomorrow night’s dinner as well.

At 6 pm, I delivered the food and got a chance to visit. When I arrived, however, there were two surprises. One not good and one just fun. The ‘not good’ surprise could have been a lot worse. Heather and Jed store their sailboat, Ardenna, in a boat lot at a friend’s house. The friend decided to take advantage of the calm late afternoon weather to burn some brush near where the boats are located. His boat is undercover in a large storage shed covered with plastic and Ardenna is out in the open next to the shed. The brush fire got out of control and before the fire department arrived, one wall of the shed started to burn. Ardenna is okay, but the friend’s boat has a lot of damage. The gel coat on one side of the boat is blistered, plus all the dinghies and the dinghy motors were in that shed and they are destroyed. It was still too soon for him to go into the shed to fully check out the damage. We’ll get the full report tomorrow. Not good, but like I said, it could have been a lot worse.

The fun surprise was that as soon as the boys got home to a yard without snow, they went to the large parking lot at Staples and brought home buckets of snow from a ‘mountain’ of snow left over from when the parking lot was plowed. They used the snow to make a snowboard run with a jump beside the house. The run goes down to the backyard that looks like an ice rink as it is covered in ice. So, when they went down the run and over the jump, they landed on ice. They decided it would be best to go back tomorrow to get more snow to cover the ice as well as it was a bit dangerous. Good idea.

It was great to visit and have dinner with the Goldstones tonight. And tomorrow night, I will get to visit with the boys and hear more about their snowboarding adventures this past week. The short story is that the weather was a real challenge, but they still had a great time.

2025 Life Logs, Day 53: Saturday Socializing
Date: Saturday, February 22, 2025
Weather: Sunny; High Temp 32, Low 30 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

This afternoon I was invited to a film preview of Unfinished Business. One of my book club members, Lynda Connolly, a judge before retiring to the Cape, and her husband Michael, who was Massachusetts Secretary of State from 1979 to 1994 after serving in the Massachusetts legislature for six years, sent the invite. Together they were the writers of this screenplay, and Michael was the director and producer. The film was shot in Massachusetts and follows the story of a young legislator, played by Michael Landes, who learns the hard way about corruption in politics in 1984. If I understood correctly, the filming was done in 2000 but put on the back burner until now. Actress Wendy Benson is in the film and according to Google, she and Landes were married that same year. The viewing was at the Falmouth Cinema Pub and everyone was served popcorn and wine. What a civil way to spend a Saturday afternoon!

After the film viewing, I went to Christina and Warren Brodie’s home for dinner. It was an impromptu dinner invitation with other friends invited. Warren did the cooking, and it was a delicious meal. He served a Portuguese kale soup with pork tenderloin, potatoes, and sauteed veggies. In addition to having a fabulous meal, it was great to get together with friends.

2025 Life Logs, Day 52: We, the People
Date: Friday, February 21, 2025
Weather: Partly Cloudy, Cold; High Temp 35, Low 18 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

As my friend Lynne Kirwin constantly reminds me, we make plans and then life happens. I had planned to drive to Vermont to spend last night and today and tonight with the Goldstones. But I got deeply involved in my current projects and the extremely cold, windy weather has caused the Goldstones to make adjustments in their plans this week. It just became too difficult for me to go visit, so I decided to stay home. I will look forward to hearing about their week of snowboarding and skiing when they get home.

Today, I continued working on my projects. One involves finding the ‘just right’ place to either upgrade Ardenna’s dodger or replace it. Ardenna is the name of Heather and Jed’s sailboat. The promise of doing this research and getting the job done was a Christmas present to Heather and Jed from the ‘mothers’—Jed’s mother and me, Heather’s mother. I somehow just got started on this today and in my first appointment, I met a most interesting woman. She is my age and has been doing upholstery and canvas work for 44 years. The appointment took much longer than it should have because both of us were interested in each other’s life stories. I had fun talking and got a very favorable estimate on the work that needs to be done. I continue next week with more appointments and will then decide who will do the work. The other project I am working on is compute-based and a secret. So, I can’t share what I am doing for hours each day. I’ll just say I am having fun doing that as well.

If you are not already reading Heather Cox Richardson on a daily basis, I recommend that it is time that you begin. Every day she is putting what is happening into historical perspective, while at the same time putting forth the most important current events. Reading her blogs is like a daily history lesson with current news flashes woven in. Just Google Heather Cox Richardson and subscribe. You will start receiving her daily bogs in your email inbox at no cost. I mention this because today’s post was so full of information. But it is what she said at the end of her post today that affected me so deeply. She outlined how the major political movements in this country have not been led by political parties. The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement … “They depended on a mass mobilization of all of us who accepted the responsibilities of being American.” Then she ended by saying, “We will prevail because we are relearning the basic truth – that we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.” I feel I need to repeat that. We, you and me, are the leaders we’ve been waiting for to solve this debacle. Today’s situation requires a people’s movement demanding that the attack on our democracy ends now. And it is my belief that all of us who love this country have an obligation to get involved in some way. That’s my two cents for today.

2025 Life Logs, Day 51: Some Good ‘Bad’ News
Date: Thursday, February 20, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny and Cold, Some Snow Late Evening; High Temp 30, Low 19 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

In a democracy, the power of the people is greater than the power of the people in office. Tonight, I heard Senator Cory Booker say something to that effect. I might not have the quote just right, but you get the idea. And day by day, the Trump-Vance-Musk team is trying to destroy our democracy as fast as they can. They know that once all Americans understand what it is they are doing, they might be stopped. It appears that is the reason for their ‘pants on fire’ approach. But people are catching on. Yesterday and today, the results of the latest polls came out. I know, who can believe any poll these days? But if you look at 4 or 5 different polls and they are all going in the same direction, you have to think there might be some truth to their numbers. The good news is that those numbers are bad news for the Trump regime. According to polls, he came into office in January with the lowest approval rating of any president in the last 70 years. And now, after a month in office, his approval rating is slightly lower. In a CNN poll his approval rating is -5% at the end of this first month. In a Pew Research Center poll it is -4%. Reuters, -7%. In a Washington Post poll, Trump’s approval rating is -8% from a month ago. In the Washington Post poll, those who STONGLY SUPPORT Trump’s actions during month one is 27%, while those who STRONGLY OPPOSE his actions is 37%. And in the same poll, when asked who they want to control the next Congress, 54% say Democrats, to 41% who say Republicans. According to the Quinnipiac University poll, 14 % approved of Trump pardoning people convicted of violent crimes related to Jan 6, while 83% opposed. That is a 63-point difference. And according to the Reuters poll, only 32% approve of Trump’s performance on inflation to date. The wrecking ball approach to destroying our government doesn’t seem to be extremely popular.

Will these ratings make a difference in what Trump is doing in the short run? Probably not. But will it get the attention of Republicans in the House and Senate. Maybe. Something else that is getting the attention of Republicans in office is the response of their constituents during Town Halls across the country. I spent an hour of my afternoon attending on Zoom an Indivisible (national) weekly update with founders Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin. They founded Indivisible after Trump’s first election. Greenberg and Levin, who happen to be married, along with others, wrote a guide that was free, giving any citizen a step-by-step guide on how to make their voices heard. They have an updated guide for 2025. During his first term, when Trump tried to take down the Affordable Care Act, citizen protests in the local Congressional offices all around the country, many of which were organized by local Indivisible chapters, certainly got the attention of our Representatives and Senators. We saved our health care system. Now we quickly need the same kind of grass roots protests and Indivisible is there to help us. I recommend that you Google Indivisible.org and check it out. You can download the new guide from the homepage. I have to believe that every little thing each of us does to resist really makes a difference. And Indivisible can help you find that ‘little thing’ you can do.

2025 Life Logs, Day 50: An Afternoon Movie
Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Weather: Still Sunny, Windy, and Cold; High Temp 31, Low 16 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Late morning, a friend picked me up and we drove to Dennis to Cape Cinema to see The Brutalist. It has 2025 Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and my award for Best Lengthy Picture. With all those nominations, I felt it was worth spending an afternoon going to see it. It really is long at 3 hours and 35 minutes. It is not an uplifting movie, but worth watching. And Adrien Brody gets my vote for Best Actor.

Today in Robert Reich’s Office Hours column, he addressed the question many of us are asking: What the hell do we do to stop this madness?” I am copying it here because I think it does a good job of outlining some options.

Friends,

The Trump-Vance-Musk regime is destroying America faster than anyone had foreseen. The combination of a supine Republican Party in control of Congress and an authoritarian Supreme Court — and, behind them, an oligarchy that’s richer and more powerful than ever — is wreaking havoc.

Some Americans don’t seem to mind or are even pleased that “fraud, waste, and abuse” are apparently being rooted out. But many are beginning to worry that the regime is going too far — that the hostile takeover of America is jeopardizing the nation’s health and safety, essential programs such as Social Security and Medicare, our nation’s scientific expertise, our national security, our efforts to save the planet, and our democracy.

I’m fairly confident that the midterm elections will mark the end of this reign of terror as Democrats regain control over the House and Senate. But I’m not sure we can we afford to wait that long.

What, if anything, can be done to stop Trump, Vance, and Musk in the meantime? That’s the subject of today’s Office Hours.

Some wise hands tell me nothing can be done until the midterm elections, and that any mass effort of resistance before then will only play into the regime’s hands. The regime is eager to use the Insurrection Act against Americans, deploying the active military and summoning right-wing vigilantes.

Others tell me that we have no choice but to engage in massive civil disobedience — a general strike on April 19, for example, the day our forefathers began the American Revolution 250 years ago. None of us shows up for work. Everything stops. Scientists stop working for the government (let RFK Jr. run an empty NIH and CDC, let Gabbard try to run without CIA and NSA labs, and the whole world without NOAA).

Not to do so signals that we’re intimidated by the bullying, which invites even more of it.
A third view I hear is that the most important way to resist now is in our local communities, where we must protect undocumented families, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else targeted by the regime.

So today’s Office Hours question: What if anything should we do now?
What’s your choice?

Nothing. Don’t provoke them.
Massive civil disobedience.
Protect the vulnerable.
Other

2025 Life Logs, Day 49: Freezing
Date: Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Weather: Still Sunny and Very Cold; High Temp 25, Low 18 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

When I went outside to play fetch with Shadow late this afternoon, it was absolutely freezing. When I came back inside, I checked WeatherUnderground and it said it “feels like 9 degrees F outside.” Then when I turned on my computer there was a little weather box on the bottom of the screen that I had never noticed before. It gave the same temperature as WU, but when I clicked on it, it said it “feels like -16 degrees F outside.” I don’t think it felt that cold, but it was one time when I could not stay out very long. It was miserable. And that wind is still raging tonight. By morning, it should calm down a bit.

I spent my day working on a couple of projects. I still have miles to go, but I made progress. Around 1:15 pm my phone range and it was Justin. He was waiting to pick up Ziggy and Coco from school and had a few minutes to talk. It is an hour later there, but when I realized it was after 1 pm here, I couldn’t believe it. The last time I had checked the clock it was 10:30 am. I had been working on a photo project and was so into it that I had lost track of time. I hadn’t thought of the devastation in Washington for over two hours. I am going to immerse myself in more projects like that.

2025 Life Logs, Day 48: We Choose to Fight
Date: Monday, February 17, 2025
Weather: Sunny, but Cold, Strong West Wind; High Temp 33, Low 17 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Protest rallies against the actions Trump, Musk, and company are taking against the federal government were held all around the country on this President’s Day. I proudly spent part of my afternoon at an Upper Cape Indivisible rally in downtown Falmouth. A coalition of other local groups joined Indivisible in this ‘We Choose to Fight’ gathering. In Falmouth, there were people of all ages, Veteran’s to members of the Wampanoag Nation, even dogs sporting signs like, “Dogs Against Doge.”

It felt so good to be doing something, even if it was just standing together with people of like mind. The rally hosts invited those who “stand against Trump’s illegal power grab and the dangerous path to fascism … unite to defend justice, equality, and our freedoms, refusing to let our rights be stripped away.” It was a great turnout even with the weather. The sun was shining brightly, but the wind was blowing around 30 mph as we gathered. The American flags were certainly flying proudly in that wind, and it felt much colder than the 30 degree temperature due to that wind.

A reminder here from Robert Reich, “It is well to remind ourselves that today is President’s Day, not Dictator’s Day.” And after reading what Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday–“He who saves his country does not violate any law.”–I don’t think there is any longer a doubt about his intentions. That quote, attributed to Napoleon, is often used as a justification for extraordinary actions in times of national crisis. Well, the only national crisis is one that Trump’s actions are causing. And we all know what happened to Napoleon.

Yesterday, Heather Cox Richarson quoted political scientist Stathis Kalyvas: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.” He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.” Today we saw many people across the United States waking up.

2025 Life Logs, Day 47: In Honor of Public Employees and Agencies
Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Weather: Snow Turning to Rain Overnight, Rain All Day; High Temp 49, Low 26 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

On October 18, 2005, my first blog post appeared on handleysail.com. A few family members and close friends were following it to get the daily news from Windbird at sea. Sometime during that first year a man named Rich started following us on the blog and we had a regular back on forth on email until Mark’s death in 2016. Sometimes we were seeking information from Rich and sometimes he was seeking information from us. Somewhere along the way, I realized we had totally different political views, but that certainly didn’t affect our friendship.

I got an email from Rich after my post last Wednesday where I declared the rollercoaster had gone off the rails in Washington, DC. In our back-and-forth communication since, Rich told me that he can’t remember if he became a Republican when Reagan ran for office or because of what Reagan did in office. And that got me to thinking about how much I disliked Ronald Reagan. I felt totally gob smacked when Reagan declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” My life experiences to that time led me to feel the exact opposite.

Then this morning I watched an interview with Michael Lewis who edited a series in the Washington Post last year called “Who is the Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service?” In mid-March a book he has edited from that material will be available. Lewis maintains the claims of ‘deep state’ are off base. Yes, there are places for trim and reform, but he says the public workforce are individuals dedicated to the public good. In his world, the government’s mission is to keep us safe. He went on to say the government tackles the problems you can’t make money solving and that the government agencies that are in existence to protect us cannot be run like a business. Should someone tell that to Elon Musk and his partner in crime, Donald Trump?

This got me to thinking of how my life would be so different if I had not had the support of government agencies to help me along the way. And in one case, how my life could have been different if there was a public safety agency at the time. I was born in Nitro, West Virginia, which is on the Kanawha River. The Kanawha runs into the Ohio River, then on to the Mississippi and out into the Gulf of Mexico. I refuse to call it the Gulf of America. Because of that, Nitro and the towns upriver from it were the home of almost every chemical plant you can name. Monsanto, Allied Chemical, and numerous other smaller chemical plants were located in my little town of Nitro. In the next town, there was Union Carbide. And on upriver there was DuPont and FMC and more. All of this in a 15-mile radius from where I grew up. The pollution was ghastly. You could smell the river, where the chemical plants freely dumped their waste, every time you turned on your faucet to get a drink of water. There was no way to complain, as almost everyone who lived there worked in those plants. Chemicals were our bread and butter. During the fall of my senior year in high school, my 33-year-old brother who was a head lab analyst at Monsanto, suddenly died of a pancreatic ‘issue’. The agriculture division at Monsanto was producing the herbicide 2,4,5-T that was in the Agent Orange the US military sprayed across Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. My brother was doing open vial testing. We’ll never know if doing open vial testing, which was later banned by OSHA when it was created in 1970, was a contributing factor in my brother’s death, but the United States Environmental Protection Agency that was created at the same time as OSHA has saved thousands of lives since then. These agencies are filled with people who have dedicated their lives to making all of our lives safer. We owe them our respect and support.

How else would my life be different if federal agencies had not been there to support me? I would probably have never been able to go to college. I had four older brothers and sisters, but none of them had gone to college. Neither of my parents had any education beyond 8th grade. And my father did not believe that girls should go to college. Women were to be secretaries and then wives and mothers in his opinion. But the Federal Work-Study Program was established by Congress as part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. This program’s purpose was to assist students with financial need by providing part-time jobs on campuses, and if possible, those jobs were to be related to the student’s field of study. I graduated from high school in 1965 and the Higher Education Act was passed in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda for this country. My father worked at Allied Chemical, but his pay was below the poverty line at the time. If I wanted to go to college, I had to do it totally on my own. Without the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, sometimes referred to as the Office of Education (now the Department of Education), and their work study and loan programs, I would not have been able to go to college. Today the US Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office administers the federal grants for college students. It is the biggest provider of financial aid for students in this country. If the current administration gets rid of the Department of Education, who is going to administer these loans? Elon Musk?

I could go on with story after story of how Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal domestic programs between 1933 and 1938 helped my parents and members of their families. All of my brothers and sisters were born between 1928 and 1935 and my dad had to move the family several times to go to where there were jobs. He even hitch-hiked over 100 miles each way to work in the mines from time to time, coming home on the weekends if he could get a ride. But with his determination and the help of the federal government, they survived. My father did not believe in what he called ‘government handouts’. He would never accept them, but he and my family knew that FDR and the federal government had their backs.

Maybe each of us needs to write our stories about how the federal government has always been there to help when help was needed and send those letters to Washington. But now I am going to ignore all this and go watch the 50th Anniversary of Saturday Night Live!!!