Good evening or morning, wherever your particular time zone may be as I post this.
I want to start with a video I posted when I started this series of diaries (as they were called then) at the original Frog Pond:
It was a post with multiple messages that seemed desperately needed at the time, and are still desperately needed. One is that we as a people (and by a people I mean more species-wide) are only going to survive by embracing diversity and cooperation. The other salient message was a subtle “fuck you” to the nationalists (right-wing and left-wing) who in their various ways created the conditions we are now suffering under, and that will now only likely get worse. I was always an internationalist of one sort or another. That was never going to change, no matter how much some on the old frog pond tried to badger folks like me into toeing a different line. I’m still here, and in one way or another will defend at all costs a set of values that is genuinely humanistic.
There is undoubtedly a spiritual aspect to Bob Marley’s work that is important to understand. I am not religious in the least. I do see us all as in some way interconnected, whether we want to believe it or not, whether want to acknowledge it or not.
I honestly don’t know an appropriate impending war-time drink. Not even sure how appropriate that would be. I will make sure the bar is open. So is the jukebox.
We all need each other. Now more than ever.