Throughstone #17: Courting Disaster

Blue lights. Late night. Rural traffic stop. Old white guy just trying to get home from the airport. No threat. No fear. Just aggravation. Yeah, one license plate bulb on the fritz, which leads to discovery. Expired registration. 

Small town municipal court one month later. Due process playing out in real time. Down and out cast of characters overall. Some can’t remember their address. Waft of weed. Somebody’s chillin’. Macroeconomics, bad luck, and poor decisions at work. Blue collar blues playing out. But I’m seeing compassion—by the lay judge (retired emergency dispatcher), the clerk, and the attorneys. 

Lots of negotiated reduced charges, mine included. Extended payment plans, offered with empathy. 

How is it that The Legal Process, the accepted foundation of American civil society, is somehow functioning with rationality and relative kindness in our meagerly-resourced rural communities…

…while fraudsters, criminals, and robber barons run rough-shod over the absolute fundamentals of our legal system from their grotesquely-gilded halls of shame?

If the gossamer threads of civil society are ripped free from their moral moorings at the federal level, then they will gain an unimaginable mass and momentum as they plummet downward to our local communities. 

We have depended upon the tethering of values and laws more than we know. Rest assured, justice and accountability still continue their awkward dance far away from that God-damned ballroom of an idea, where deals are made and the people are played. 

We court disaster when we forget that freedom has a framework: We The People. 

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“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-daily reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.

250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku. 

Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.

More free-ranging rambles here, if you’re so inclined: https://www.freerangeprof.com/blog