Still marked by prints in the dust in the hallways and the passing of distant trains

[sovay]

A year on and the government is shut down; as I waited for a bus in Davis Square, I saw protesters flocking to the T with familiar hats and signs, heading to the next women's march. I am not at the march because I am getting ready to head to Providence for tonight's reading, but I hope it's jam-packed and I hope the protests keep coming. I'm glad to see this anniversary. I don't like the idea that we have been battered numb or complacent, especially when every day I check the news and see something else like the fact that we now have a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" of HHS. Dissent is heartening; I hope it's making a difference. We're not a crater of radioactive dust or a barbed-wire partition of camps and I appreciate both of these things, but I worry more these days about the dystopia I can't see.

Dorothy Malone has died. She was ninety-three; she was landscape. As it happens, she's in the cast of a movie I have out from the library right now, but first I might just watch that scene from The Big Sleep (1946) again. If you interested her vaguely, you were doing better than the devotion of many a star.

I highly recommend this essay by Masha Gessen about choice and identity: "To Be, or Not to Be."

Comments

[shewhomust]

I look forward to the creation of a department that upholds the right of, say, immigration officials to act in accordance with their conscience and religious beliefs. And military personnel. And whistle blowers...

The list is endless, really.

[sovay]

And whistle blowers...

Amen.

The list is endless, really.

My conscience prompts me to change this government. Please direct me to the proper office.