A Week To Remember

Hayfield along Exeter Road in Hampton Before the Storm

If we'd thought about it, we might have known this would be a week of change and consequence, but we were living out our daily routines and not paying attention to the notices that the Supreme Court would hand down their rulings on Obamacare and gay marriage, and there were notices that a storm was coming at week's end and the world might seem to be changing under our feet. It is blowing hard out there in Hampton today, and cold, fifty something at the last week in June. The world seems to have changed; winds of change.

Plaice Cove Surging 

Mr. Boat and I went for our customary morning gambol at Plaice Cove and had the beach to ourselves initially; then a solitary dog, followed by his human companion, pushing forward against the force of the winds which carried with them rising seas and great crashing breakers such as we have never seen at that beach. I was afraid for a moment those waves surging in and rushing out might carry Mr. Boat out to sea.  When the dog walker got close enough to me to be heard, he lifted his eyes and said, "I think it might snow." Anything seemed possible, this week.

We laughed but I thought he had captured the moment: nothing about this week seemed ordinary. The breakers crashing in on a strong wind constituted what they call "pathetic fallacy" in English lit classes--as when a storm crashes behind King Lear to reflect the passions surging within the king.

And passions were surging this week: Those who believe they have the right to tell others who to love were outraged by those five "lawyers" who said, no, actually, you can choose who you love, but you cannot tell others they cannot love who they love. And if those others make choices you find outrageous, you will have to live with that.

"Choices" is likely a loaded word--it's been used by people who vilify homosexuals to suggest gay people could simply have chosen to be different but they have perversely "chosen" to be nasty and homosexual, just to spite their parents and proper society. Of course, it's not like that. Gays do not look for that life; they simply discover what attracts them and likely are powerless to resist or change that chemistry.

Even heterosexuals may experience something like that when they run across someone they feel drawn to.  As Justice Kennedy noted, children raised by gay parents show no ill effects except those emanating from those who disapprove of their families. L'enver est less autres. Hell is other people. It's not the love which spawns the misery, it's the naysayers.

Gail Collins noted this is the court which disemboweled campaign finance reform with Citizen's United and handed the keys to the kingdom, once again, to the rich and powerful and they have rendered a series of decisions injurious to the commonweal, but at least this week, they got it right.

Sea Grass in the Wind

News from Washington washed across our small town in New Hampshire; winds from the West swept our sea; it has felt like we have been driven by forces greater than our own, carried along by tides not under our control, and yet, there is a happiness here and we find ourselves smiling.