The date is October 8, 2018.
I live in Kentucky, if you don't know who my senators are look it up. If you don't know who the President was on this date, well you must be from the future and that would be great because sitting here on a hot October night in almost record breaking heat predicting that there will be a future is very optimistic.
A lot of grandparents end up at fruit stands with pumpkin patches on Sunday afternoons in October. Henry David Thoreau held melon parties for the citizens of Concord in late summer. He played his flute and people danced. There were probably grandparents and grandchildren in attendance. He enjoyed those gatherings even though his country was troubled and entering a dangerous and deadly period of its history.
His family were abolitionists. They often harbored escaped slaves. Thoreau "conducted" a number of them to the train to Canada himself. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown stayed at his house in Concord. Thoreau thought pretty deeply about freedom, democracy, and community. His definition of community included the natural world -- the whole of living things and the people and trees and frogs that lived out their lives in Concord Massachusetts.
Sunday afternoon, October 7th I was standing in a pumpkin patch by the Ohio river in Kentucky with my family - granddaughter, nephew, grandnephew, all the young ones, when the band played an old protest song that spoke for the poor and condemned the lies of the rich. All the sorrow of the last two years filled my heart and wet my eyes.
Around here there's a lot of talk of limited government that sounds to me like limited Compassion and limited Community. Quite of few people I've met here definitely believe in Unlimited Racism as the best reason for limited government.
