Losing Our Identity – And Yet
I’m writing this early on election eve, before all the relevant western polls have closed and before Steve Kornacki has bored deep into the Big Board. So, while writing this, I don’t know whether the naked emperor will be sidelined for court appointments that will put him in jail, or if the unthinkable election absurdity has come to pass and he’s going to be our president again.
Like many common-sense, everyday Americans I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that an aging charlatan, compulsive liar, convicted sexual predator, convicted felon, aspirational dictator and almost certainly mentally ill-failed businessman, could even qualify as a candidate for anything.
And yet.
We all know with absolute certainty that the 2020 election was not stolen. Because if it was, then some 60 federal and state judges who ruled otherwise are complicit in the most extraordinary conspiracy in human political history.
And yet.
The naked emperor has built a successful campaign around this transparently vacuous lie, while an unending parade of seemingly sane and accomplished political and corporate enablers are willing to surrender their integrity, swallow any shame they may have left, ignore the accurately awful things they have said and written about him in the past, and pretend that the naked emperor is wearing a magical shimmering suit of glorious robes while also knowing he is buck naked.
And yet.
Like many people of any particular party or persuasion I find myself incredulous that in the United States of America, the bastion and very model of democracy, a man like Donald Trump could become president, perhaps more than once. Committing numerous, documented sexual assaults, calling his female opponent trash, referring to media members as scum and proposing that the courageous conservative former Congresswoman Liz Cheney should face a firing squad, would seem to be so out of bounds as to be disqualifying. It’s hard to imagine the nation I love led again by the presidency of Donald Trump, the lowest political common denominator in the nation again. It feels like losing our national identity.
And yet.
Disqualifying is also a term I would apply to the latest plan revealed by Napa developer Keith Rogal, who has submitted to the Sonoma County Planning Department a proposal for 990 housing units at the Sonoma Developmental Center. Rogal’s new schematic shows rows of three-and-four story apartment buildings, 35 to 45 feet high, lining both sides of Arnold Drive, creating a visual tunnel through the campus, obscuring views of Sonoma Mountain, and turning a soul-nurturing rural landscape into an urban hardscape with few recognizable features of the historic campus.
Like many other Glen Ellen/Eldridge residents I find myself incredulous that in the bucolic, tranquil, historic village, snug against the flank of Sonoma Mountain and Jack London’s Beauty Ranch, a clueless county government and a distant and disinterested state government, delivered the fate of our collective home into the profit-driven hands of an out of town commercial developer whose only imperative is building enough housing units to guarantee a healthy profit
Which, in his calculus, apparently requires a population of nearly 2,400 people, with their 5,000 vehicles, who knows how many pets, loud stereos and light pollution, destroying one of the most important wildlife corridors in Sonoma County, while overwhelming the roads and the resources of a village that will ultimately lose its very identity.
And yet.
