"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wild World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or to me.
I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all.”
--Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Chapter 1, "The Riverbank"
I'm going to the creek this afternoon, to meet (at a distance) with a friend I haven't seen since before Covid.
Running water is restorative.
I could have used that yesterday, a day off work, but I didn't have the energy to go even half-a-mile. I did manage to tend the potato with the girlettes, but otherwise I was mostly reading in bed. *
Work the day before had been so heavy, I felt like a squashed bug.
Here was the nadir of that workday:
I was cleaning the office. Looters had dumped the contents of the desk drawers onto the floor. I'd swept the carpet, but couldn't get up all the many individual staples.
I was picking staples out of the carpet when my coworker "Lead Cashier" (LC) came in.
She is originally from Hungary and had given an interview about the police murder of George Floyd to a leftist newspaper there.
Hungary, you may know, is in the hands of leaders, starting with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who support the view that Nazi Germany and its Axis allies (including Hungary) in WWII were the "heroic defenders of Europe".
[Article "My SS Uniform Is Just My Heritage"]
LC wanted to read me a couple comments Neo-Nazi Hungarians had left in response to her published interview.
Did I want to hear Neo-Nazi comments while kneeling on a filthy carpet picking up staples dumped by looters after a lynching?
Why, no. I didn't.
But what can you say to someone who is being targeted by such people? "Go away, that will ruin my day"?
If we're in this together, as the current saying goes, then we have to bear it together, right? If we can...
At least Lead Cashier and I were wearing face masks, so we couldn't pass the plague to each other!
And it did sort of ruin my day.
Not the comments so much, which were what you'd expect––almost laughable, in fact, if they weren't so scary––but seeing their effect on LC. Not just the personal attacks, but that her homeland has been taken over by such people.
It's like if Trump wins in November and Makes the Confederacy Great Again.
Whatcha gonna do?
If we're lucky, we can go sit in a pleasant spot and take a break from the Wild World.
"The Riverbank" illustration by E. Shepherd
*I'm reading The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald, a biography of her father and his brothers, one of whom married the daughter of Ernest Shepherd, Mary, who illustrated the Mary Poppins books. Or was it Penelope Fitzgerald's brother who married Mary Shepherd?
I don't have time to check right now--I'm off to the creek!
There is right wing scariness nearly everywhere.
ReplyDeleteA riverbank is a good place to go
not sure how White Supremacists have become a virus on their own...it is everywhere, and My hope is that whiteness will die off after all of this...Does not look promising though does it? I do not understand at all. As the earth heats up however, those without an ounce of melanin will fry under the sun, so there is that- in the meanwhile we march, protest, write letters, sign petitions do art. AND go to the creek.
ReplyDeleteThe world is fast becoming a scary place. Let's go sit on a riverbank instead. I've never read The Wind in the Willows.
ReplyDeleteAs GZ said, there's lunacy everywhere. We had a big right-wing demonstration yesterday in London that basically consisted of drunken yobs hurling objects at the police.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting article you linked to on Hungary. I especially loved: “Inventing traditions,” wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, “is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition.” Very applicable to today's Civil War "history".
ReplyDelete