In Tarot, the Fool card represents folly, mania, intoxication, and delirium; or, if reversed, negligence, carelessness, and vanity. It can also mean the beginning or the end of something.

Fools

We have proven again that as a nation we cannot keep our precious children safe. How much will we need to endure before the dam breaks? Before those that choose to support guns meant for military-level carnage will bend their knees and admit that AR-15s ripping through nine-year-old bodies are not what our Founders had in mind? That it’s not what parents, teachers, janitors, doctors, nurses, anyone with a heart has in mind? This is not what any sane person should be required to bear.

This paragraph of questions is all I can imagine that stands between those of us who hold life dear and those who condone such policies. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has put forward legal arguments that require ordinarily sensible lawyers to go back now to what the Founders had in mind regarding gun control at a time when we did not have a standing army and allowed individuals to support guns for militias. Period. At a time when there was no law regarding “gun control,” or “red flags for mental illness” because those concepts did not exist. Thomas’s ruling requires that we find reasons for gun control that existed at the time the second amendment was instituted in 1791; at a time when there were no assault rifles, no ghost guns, no concept of domestic violence, no indiscriminate murdering of school children. What gives him and his sick mind the power to put us in this legally binding backwater? How did we come to be in this place?

Of course we could trace it back, all the tiny steps that have brought us to and over the threshold of gun insanity. We could mark, at each tiny step, how the majority of us did nothing to stop the slow insidious journey to now. But because we are at this “now,” we must find a way to unravel this vast tangled and complicated web of misinformed and highly-financed misguidedness.

Surely, we can all look at the consequences — children’s exploded bodies — and agree that this is not where we thought we were headed; and certainly not where we want to be regarding guns and gun rights. (Doctor Joseph Fusco was on hand at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital in Nashville when the bodies arrived. He said, “This should never happen to children. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but suffice to say that injuries from these weapons are essentially unsurvivable for children.”)

Hallie Scruggs, William Kinney, and Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, (called “a beacon of light and hope”), had a right to live, to be children, to sit and laugh on a swing set, and grow into radiant and radical teenagers, and useful satisfied adults. Certainly, school janitor Mike Hill, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, and headmistress Katherine Koonce — now all dead — were not being paid to police classrooms for terror and mayhem, but instead to assist young minds into becoming their best most fulfilled and curious vessels. Can we not agree on that?

Please review the steps we’ve taken to land here — in which a school full of our most vulnerable and precious citizens is the target for military assaults of the twisted-minded; in which the potential of our nation, its youth, is what we are willing to sacrifice in order to buy, carry, handle, use and misuse weapons meant for war.

I would say this qualifies us as a nation of fools.

Grifters

The indictment boom has been lowered, allowing Trump to continue fund raising in order not to improve the lives of his base, or any other Americans, but to pay for the many lawyers he will need in the coming months. (Since the announcement of the indictment his organization has raised $7 million.) Stormy Daniels may prove to be the least of his worries as mishandling of classified documents, his call to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia, his instigation of the January 6th insurrection, and other topics continue their roll through our legal system.

We’ve all watched his criminal behavior go unlitigated for decades, but perhaps these talents he has may come to finality in this the second decade of the new millennium when in choosing to become president he, therefore, attracted the biggest brightest best and largest international spotlight he could ever have wanted. (This spotlight has revealed just a few shadows.) On the Fool Card in Tarot, the fool goes blithely along, whistling and oblivious, stepping off the cliff in front of him, his faithful dog at his heels.

We’ll be watching and hoping our legal system is a match for this supreme and foolish grifter. Even as flip-floppers like Lindsey Graham (“Count me out”) and Kevin McCarthy (he wanted to urge Trump to step down) and the now in deep-hot-water commentators on Fox News with their behind the scenes comments about the “stolen election” (Trump’s claims are “ludicrous,” “nonsense,” and “bs”) — snap to his side in a reflex of self-preservatory obeisance. When will the GOP repair its spine, or has this essential series of vertebrae been so irrevocably dissolved as to be non-existently-reptilian for all time?

My father, a conservative and compassionate Republican, if he were not long dead, would be weeping I know and silent-lipped as he treads through the wreckage of his beloved Grand Old Party, witnessing the demolition of values he held dear: country, honor, family; the United States he fought for unrecognizable and diminished on the world stage when a person of this low caliber blubbers about vengeance and stolen elections while so many of his fellow Americans are suffering.

Bras and neckties

Last and also possibly least (though maybe murdering our children takes that place), where have all the neckties gone? New York Times reporter Peter Coy has 252 neckties — and 8 bow ties — abandoned in his closet. As he writes, “My neckties threaten to become a ‘stranded asset,’ in utility regulation lingo. A stranded asset is something like a coal-fired generating plant that is no longer useful because of changes in regulation or technological obsolescence. Unless I wear them, defiantly, my necktie assets will be stranded in my closet, yearning to see the light of day but profoundly obsolete.” (Not one of the G7 leaders at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany last June sported a tie.)

I might say the same thing about bras. Was it the stay-at-homeness during the pandemic that inspired many of us of the female persuasion (oh, wait, can we say that?) to jettison our bras and simply slip on a T-shirt for lounging, the desire to be free of bondage a ruling feature of those sad uncertain months? And even now that we are back to normal. . .oh, wait again, there is no normal, only an ever-revolving shot-gun of strange and deadly weather events, unconscionable political happenings, eruptions of war, lethal train derailments, and shortages of what-next?

Well, anyway, my one comfortable bra hangs limply on the closet doorknob in the morning while I decide — “To wear or not to wear?” Who will I see at Jack’s or the post office? Or can I get in and out fast enough to hop back into my bubble? These are the dilemmas of the modern woman, or, at least, this modern woman. Meanwhile, my “stranded asset” seems perfectly content to wait it out.

And, in the grand scheme of things, whether to wear a bra seems about as worthwhile a thing to worry about as any of these other troubling developments — at least it’s one I have some control over.