Just when you thought nothing worse could happen....

The president, in what may have been his longest tweet ever, gave the lie to thinking nothing worse could happen.

What did he say?

1) He increased more tariffs against China after they answered his earlier tariffs with those of their own. (The Dow Jones Average fell 643 points over that statement!)

2) He said 'fake news' (by which he means the honest mainstream media) was fueling talk of a recession that can't happen since the American economy has never been better.

3) He pondered whether dictator Xi of China or Jerome Powell, head of the Federal Reserve Bank was the greatest enemy of America. (The President appointed Powell to the job!!! So, if he is an enemy of American, who put him there???)

4) He said American companies are 'ordered' not to do business with China. (Never mind that no President has that power or has ever suggested they did. Plus, in the global economy, the US is intimately connected to China as well as Western Europe, Japan, Mexico and markets in the rest of the world. Parts of every thing you own, though manufactured in America, came from China or some other countries. Things we sell to China have parts made in China.)

That would seem to be enough for one day, but he is leaving in an hour or so for the G-7 summit of 7 of the most important countries in the world (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, the UK and the US) most of whom have no idea what he's thinking or how he will behave. He left the last G-7 summit over a tiff with Angela Merkel.

I want to go to sleep tonight and wake up with Obama or any responsible adult as President in the morning.

And I want the Republicans to come to their senses and realize this guy is dragging them down the rabbit hole...or a black hole.

I believe in two party government. We don't have that now--we have the Democrats, who have lots of disagreements but will stand together, a few honest and brave Republicans, who seem to retire from Congress after becoming honest and brave, and these folks who mindlessly follow a man who has some serious issues that make him unfit to be President.

God save us.....

A very bad, awful, terrible, no-good day today.

jokes can hurt

President Who-Will-Not-Be-Named joked today about 'trading' Puerto  Rico for Greenland.

The response from our island possession was swift and unambiguous.

"Yes!!!" the Puerto Ricans said. "Let us be part of Denmark!"

People started posting "becoming Denmark" kits on line--with some winter clothes and a Spanish/Danish dictionary.

It was laughable in some respects.

But deep down, it was racist and painful.

To trade one island populated by Hispanics for one populated by almost all white people is not a joke: it is how this president thinks and believes.

I know, I know....some people still content, as he does, that he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. But between his many comments about brown people and his recent anti-Semitic views that any Jew who votes for a Democrat is being 'disloyal' to Israel and his attacks on four Congresswomen of color...come on, you've got to at least admit he sounds racists.

Don't you?

And if you don't, contact me and we'll talk about it. Either comment on the blog or write to me at Padrejgb@alo.com.

We'll talk without racist sounding jokes.




 

How inappropriate can you be?

This afternoon, for a while, it was raining AND the sun was shining.

It reminded me of what people used to say where I come from when that happened.

They would say: "the Devil is beating his wife."

Satanism and domestic abuse all rolled into one! How inappropriate can you be?

I never heard anyone explain why they said that, just as people never explained all sorts of aphorisms they had about things. It makes no real sense. Was the rain or the sunshine symbolizing the Devil? The beating must be the rain, so how is the sun the Devil?

It's as inexplicable as my father's insistence that if you left our home and turned around to come back for something you forgot you absolutely, positively had to sit down for a moment. Bad luck not to. Go figure how that came up.

Some other sayings from my childhood I can't figure out how they came to be:

"Diddly Squat" for 'nothing'.

"Thin as a hen's skin" for being sensitive.

"Naked as a jay bird"--jay birds have feathers.

"Haven't seen you in a coon's age"--how old do raccoons get?

"Flying off the handle" for getting angry.

"Can't get blood from a turnip" when someone won't give you what you want.

"Gussied up" for being well dressed.

"Worn slap out" for being exhausted.

Go try to figure out where all that comes from.

Shalom and good luck.

Abide with me

Today is the feast of St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux (1153) and the gospel is this:

John 15:7-11

⁷If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. ⁸My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. ⁹As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. ¹⁰If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. ¹¹I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

"Abide" was a word often used in Appalachia when I grew up there.

You'd be walking down the street and people up on their porch would say, "Jimmy, come up and 'bide a spell." And I would.

Often there was no conversation at all, just 'abiding', being with, being close to.

And I think that's what Jesus is talking about in John 15--just 'being with him', without agenda or purpose. Just 'biding a spell'.

Just that.

And it is enough.

Enough and more than enough.

Abiding is enough and more than enough.

 

Josh

Six days ago, our son Josh turned 44.

Lordy, lordy am I that old!!!

Yes, of course I am.

He was sometimes tough as a teen. I sometimes tell people Josh spent his Junior year of high school abroad but forgot to leave the country.

But he was a wondrous little boy and became wondrous after his freshman year of college. He went to U. Mass., the only school he applied to and graduated with a 3.3 average after a disastrous Freshman year.

He spent a year in England, after college, on a special visa he earned, working in a pub most of that time near the Chelsey soccer stadium and became, as he does about anything he is interested in, a educated soccer fan. He's taught me so much about the game I watched every game the US played in the woman's World Cup. After Chelsey he spent a couple of months backpacking around Europe.

For a year after that, he lived with us and worked at the Benieke Rare Book Library at Yale where he became beloved by catching a guy stealing pages out of rare books.

Then he went to Brooklyn Law School and met Cathy Chen, who he married later and the two of them gave us three wondrous granddaughters--Emma, Morgan and Tegan.

He's now the youngest partner in one of the largest law firms in Baltimore and Cathy is a judge of the First Circuit of Maryland--Baltimore City--after spending a few years defending victims of sexual abuse and then being a prosecutor in Baltimore.

What a joy Josh and his family are to us.

He's much more like Bern than me, though he's an extrovert and Bern is a real introvert.

They share the same mindset, like Mimi and I do.

And it almost makes me faint with joy when I think about what Josh has meant to me and to so many.

Our children are our greatest joy--and greatest amazement.

What did we do to deserve them???

But I'm glad they are with us. So glad. Delirious, really.

Happy, Happy Birthday and Life, my dear son Joshua Dylan Bradley (after Bob Dylan, of course!)

Gillum vs. Santorum--no contest!

On CNN's 'State of the Nation', two of the people on the panel were former Senator Rick Santorum and former mayor and close in race for Governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum.

Santorum gave the NRA's stock in trade answer to the gun crisis: 'guns don't kill people, people kill people.'

Gillum immediately responded, "that's like saying opioids  don't kill people, the people who take opioids kill people."

Brilliant. So brilliant I wish I had thought of it. So brilliant I'll be using it over and again.

As I've said before and will doubtless have to say again, if the guy in Sante Fe and the guy in Ohio--or Vas Vegas or Sandy Hook or Parkland...on and on--hadn't had a gun they would have been lucky to kill one person before they were subdued by the crowd.

People may 'want to kill people', but without guns they wouldn't be very successful.

Guns and opioids kill people.

Well done Mayor Gillum!

Well done!!!

Coming up on 49

While we're on Oak Island in September with Mimi, Tim, Eleanor, Jack, Sherry and John, Bern and I will celebrate our 49th anniversary.

One short of 50.

But we've known each other longer than that.

We met in introductory Latin class in high school (Amo, Amas, Amat). I was a Senior and she was a Freshman. I was 18 and she was 15. I was taking Latin because I had applied to Shimmer College (now part of the University of Chicago) and they required a year of foreign language. The only language taught at Gary High School was Latin.

I didn't go to Shimmer and I didn't learn much Latin. I need to remind you I grew up in a very rural part of southern West Virginia. There were 99 people in my graduating class. I rode a bus 13 miles, twice a day, to get to high school. These were the coal fields. Both our fathers were coal miners--Bern's until he retired, mine until after WWII when his lungs wouldn't let him go back inside the mountains.

We dated that year and whenever I was home for three years of college. Then in 1964, she joined me at West Virginia University and we were again senior and freshman. I went to Cambridge to Harvard Divinity School the next year and then in September of 1970 we were married and went back to Cambridge together.

I was 23 and she was 20.

And here we are, together and settled and joyful, 54 years after we met. We have spent all those years--not always easily--together.

Together.

I can't imagine a life I could have lived without Bern. I really can't.

I've spent 3/4 of my life with her.

She is my life.

She really is.

What a joy!!!