Today the sun came out, big and bright, and warm temperatures melted some snow into water, and you could see it run in the streams for the first time in many, many months. This was such a cold winter. So cold, for so long. Snow banked all over – small snow mountains covering every inch of grass. Frozen hard over the last few weeks to be all but impenetrable except for an errant foot or paw.

But today, it began to melt away, so fast! Amazing how a bit more sunlight and a lot more degrees Fahrenheit can change things.

Times are very stressful, as I am sure (or I think?) they may be with all of us. I have been a student of philosophy, law, and the government for many years. I began as a cross-examination debater when I was 15-16, sophomore year of high school. That year I learned about legal arguments, topicality, philosophical trajectories, speech patterns, structure, order, and logic. Debate was wonderful for me; debate taught me how to speak in front of strangers with confidence, which was a problem I had had for many years. I used to always speak holding my hand in front of my mouth, until I began debate with my friends, hanging out on the outskirts at the end of freshman year.

The government that as inaugurated in January is making striking, strident changes to systems that seemed almost impenetrable in their layers of bureaucracy. I have this theory that people in general are good, and I believe that the layers of that bureaucracy are like the one I am more familiar with: public education. Almost everyone is in the mix for the right reasons, but the structures and inertia can be insurmountable. Watching someone, who I think is on drugs of some kind, speak more than a US President, brandish a chainsaw on the internettelevision, and then use a metaphorical chainsaw on departments all over the government is so frightening.

When my school, which was named Gus Garcia Middle School, in Austin ISD, went under restructuring due to vast failures (more on that another time), one of the things that every teacher had to do was keep a binder at the front of the room, next to the door, so that if anyone from the district, Region 13 Service Center, or TEA could look at data you had collected inside that binder. Data came from assessments. It was so stressful to think that anyone coming in your classroom would look at the binder and somehow “see” something you weren’t doing. The realities of what was happening at the school were complicated and multi-layered and go back to the history of Austin being a highly segregated city. Segregation’s effects linger and can strikingly effect districts perceptions of schools and neighborhood. Resources follow that line of thinking, resources in the form of things, and not people who could really make a difference.

Anyway, I digress.

When I read about the massive layoffs of people, real people with real lives!, I wonder: what are they doing? Isn’t it bad politically to have lots of people lose their jobs when you are president?

I don’t understand what is happening and why and what it means for all of us. We live in a very isolated place almost up to the Canadian border; will anything happen here? If this was 1850, would we even know of anything happening? I just don’t know, and that makes me feel guilty. But is there anything I could do? What would it be?

These are the questions swirling around my mind. There is nothing we can do and yet —

Something big is changing, bigger than anything in our lifetime. The only thing I can compare it to is 9/11 – it feels similar to that time. Everything is uncertain, government are giant jerks, shower, rinse, repeat.

The universe is showing 7/9 (there I said it) planets in a line on Friday night. All year I have thought that the universe wants us to look up. Look up at the stars? At ourselves? In a dream the other night I said to someone that the thing I miss the most when I leave Maine are the stars. I realized that must be true.