BACK FROM EUROPE, BABY

Great, great, great, incredible, life-defining sort of vacation. I am truly blessed to be able to do things like this with my happy family.

Scotland Wrapup-

First week, we stayed in a castle. Yes, really. They rent them. They actually rent castles. It's called Saddell, and here is its wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddell_Castle. Sadly it had no internet, but who gives a flying cracker. It was a castle. I was staying in a castle. There were battlements. It was right on the World's Coldest Ocean, but there were ducks and birds and evil spiky plants and just the most wonderful, wonderful air of timelessness. 

After that, we stayed (limited internet again) at a lovely little lodge on the River Ness, and went down to the loch and saw their castle and the museums, though no Nessie.  I have crosstiched and plan to make bookmark gifts for various relatives.  There were more ducks here, and birdnests.

I am still slightly jetlagged, but hopefully updates soon on comics, pets, and those essays I talked about, which are almost done and rambling but interesting.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

That up there?  The string of IIIIIIIIIs?

That is my wall.  I have decided this.  I am building it.

I will start with a small cabin in the NC mountains, bought cheap because it will start out as a trailer.  I will have a shotgun, some pistols, and two or three very large dogs.  Somewhere back on the edge of the property, I will dig a hidey-hole big enough to sleep in, and stock it with food.

Then I will build my wall.

I say this because I read history books, and I read current affairs, and I am genuinely afraid that at some point in my life I will end up living under a facist government and I will need to be prepared.  There is a lot of scary scary hate running around in this country at the moment, and a lot of the time people aren't stopping it. 

Look, I love my country.  I believe in America.  But nothing in history has stayed together.  Sooner or later, humanity forgets the lessons it has learned. 

Here's what I get in the paper this morning.  Some people don't like what the President's doing, and so they protest.  Nothing wrong with that.  Every President has been protested.  Every President has also deserved it.  But what you get is the extremes, the white supremacists, the creep who said he preferred to be termed a "seperatist", and they hang around the edges and start bringing signs and tossing slurs.  And no one does a thing.  Little kids come to those protests- people always bring some kids to protests, and as a kid I can honestly not imagine anything I would have enjoyed doing less, but anyway- kids are there.  A kid hears one of those creeps talking, is she going to look at her black classmates the same way?  If her parents do the polite thing, and ignore the crazies like they aren't there, that kid still has ears.  I was a kid.  We hear more than you think.

So, this gets printed in the newspaper, and the basic response?

"Oh, yeah?  Well, what about the racism in the NAACP?"

The clear implication being, you know, make yourselves perfect and then maybe you can complain about people throwing racial slurs in your direction.

No.  Screw that.  I'm going to spell it out real clear and easy: The white supremacists are the bad guys, here.  I do not understand why this is such a difficult thing to grasp.

Anyway, I fully antcipate the local editor's letters page to become furious and hostile as angry people on all sides and some who just want their names in the paper chime in at the top of their lungs.  Freedome of speech, I tell myself.  The country's still strong.

But I can't ignore the hate everywhere.  Things are festering again.  Last time this happened, I think, we got the sixties. 

I'm just not sure that this time we're gonna be that lucky.