I have to pace myself on the news. Rachel Maddow and usually one of the others, and when I can catch her, Christiane Amanpour (it plays at midnight here, so I've finally cranked up the PBS app that I've got with my regular PBS donation). More than that and I'm a little crazy by bedtime.

My children are bi-racial, and I've been careful not to press them one way or the other. My mother would have been a basket case and made me feel horrible if I'd done anything so dangerous as protesting back in the late 1960s, early 1970s. As it happened, proximity was more a factor than anything else (there wasn't much protesting going on in the places available to me). But in recent years I have marched. As it happens, we are all still so concerned about the COVID-19 that my and their protest activity is concentrated with donations to various causes.

Many of my elderly neighbors are GOP supporters (this is Texas, though urban areas are more liberal), but in the past when I've put up candidate signs in the yard people have stopped and quietly noted they also vote that way. During the last election there were Trump vandals attacking signs and houses if Clinton signs were put out. This time a Biden sign WILL go in the yard, and I'm at an intersection in the road so I can promote it in three different directions, not just to passers-by.

Politically I am aligned with the African American family across the street, and not with the Euramerican neighbors on either side of me, but we're civil, and simply put out yard signs and don't generally talk politics when we meet. We won't be changing each other's minds, but I do hope that they're extremely disappointed come November. I'm really tired of this Groundhog Day world we live in, and a cop in Minneapolis, showing off for his two trainees as he killed a black man, is the one who has finally pushed everyone too far. His misfortune that a 17-year-old girl stood her ground and got the entire thing on video, and that the world was in the COVID-19 suspended animation and had all of the time in the world to pay attention. Dismantle these petty armies of police in cities and train them to serve people, not antagonize them. It's going to be messy, but it needs to be done.

And we don't need any more saccharine poetry from WAV, but since it isn't kind to verbally duel with unarmed opponents, I just try to ignore his nonsense.