What's Tony Thinking

Confessions, Corrections and Clarifications

A week or two ago, my dear spouse said, “Gee, it doesn’t seem like we’ve really had winter this year.”

She’s a powerful woman. But I didn’t know she could summon the seasons.

Meanwhile, I taunted Seattle’s response to rumors of snow in my post on the Seattle tunnel, noting that as with many of our dire predictions of snow the dire prediction of VIA DOOM had not come to pass. Weather said, “Okay, I’ll show you,” bringing snow and bitter cold early the day after my remarks.

But wait, there’s more on the way, maybe a real winter smackdown this time. So says Northwest weather guru Cliff Mass.

Mass is quoted as predicting “a huge snow dump,” and “a snow apocalypse” coming Friday and Saturday. It has happened before and may happen again. I still remember the winter/ Christmas of 1996 – 97, when we had a solid two feet of snow around for a long time. I think that was the year we discovered Seattle owned no actual snow plows.

Perhaps foolishly, I am heading out today (Thursday) to Wenatchee with the idea of a couple days of skiing at Mission Ridge. I’m pretty sure I’ll get there. Getting back may be another story.

In that same post on the tunnel, I wondered about what will now, post- Viaduct, emerge on the Seattle waterfront. Will it be a developer’s bonanza or space and place for the public to enjoy the waterfront?

At which point I heard from another powerful woman, friend and City Council member, Sally Bagshaw.

It seems that the new vision for the waterfront is well underway and does have public space at its center. Twenty-six blocks of public park.

So that’s great. Thanks Sally for updating me, and for the many of you who have been working away on this for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gender line and country, things are not going well for the males of the species in Virginia. No one really foresaw this “Save Ralph” strategy, i.e. anyone who might succeed him being outed for either racism or sexual assault.

In my post on Northam, which argued for him to stay. Deal with his and our nation’s racism — rather than pretending that’s all behind us now. I quoted St. Paul. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3) “All” is the operative word there, but I didn’t mean that the entire upper echelon of the Old Dominion’s government should take it quite so literally. Golly!

In that post, I spoke of the KKK as a “terrorist organization in the South.” One reader pointed out that the KKK also existed in the North and that my own home state, Oregon, “had laws forbidding Negroes to live in the state after the Civil War” and “had very active KKK groups.”

So this blog, as you can see is a kind of re-visiting previous posts, to make some confessions and corrections.

One more. Linda also noted that I was the only person she’d read who wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about Stacey Abrams and her response to the SOTU.

Since then there’s even been talk of Abrams for President.

It’s true. I wasn’t bowled over by Abrams talk. I did acknowledge that these SOTU response slots are a tough gig. But I still felt like this one was a bit of talking point check off, not a real response to he-who-occupies-an-alternate-reality-of-his-own-creation.

One who shared my take wrote, “For starters, if your objective is to win over a portion of middle America, you should not begin by wishing us a happy lunar new year… Oh, Democrats.”

Meanwhile, one of the most interesting post-SOTU pieces I saw was Tom Edsall’s on Tucker Carlson. Carlson sounds a bit like the French conservatives I mentioned, citing to Mark Lilla, in December (“Soul-Searching on the Right”). Edsall also brings in the work of Oren Cass on the plight of American labor. These are important pieces to help some of us understand what’s driving immigration backlash. Worth reading.

They also relate to my concern about the Democratic Party. Getting these economic issues and how they become cultural issues ought to be higher on the Democratic agenda, i.m.h.o.

So, happy winter. Aren’t the seasons one of God’s best inventions?