I went to the library today to pick up a couple of things. One of them is an inter-library loan that would have gone back to its home branch if I hadn't gone to pick it up today. I'd intended to go Saturday, but as it turned out I was unavailable due to something that could laughingly be referred to as "work." But anyway, I caught it in time.
Also I took note of a couple of reopenings today. Some businesses and other orgs closed down for late November and the first two weeks of December as part of something called the "Rhode Island Pause." Basically a "let's pretend we're accomplishing something" C19 policy. So those particular places are springing back to life at least.
2 comments:
I'm very glad to know a few more places are opening for business and can only hope that more will follow before long. There are lots of people besides ourselves who are fed up with these arbitrary rules. One woman in England said, 'If it's a real pandemic why does it need so much PR? If people were actually falling down in the street they'd have to pay me to go outside.'
I liked this comment by G.K. Chesterton:
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
I did post some pictures of the park so you see for yourself what I natter on about.
The Englishwoman you quote speaks the truth. There is so much we hear repeated when it can be - and has been - discredited. I mean, I'm going to have trust issues for the rest of my life, at least as far as some people are concerned.
Another good one from Chesterton, somewhat appropriate:
All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity.
It was nice to see those pictures of the park, and of you. It seems like a very lovely place. Hope they keep it that way.
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