“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams”
(Eleanor Roosevelt)
I took Gingernut the cat to the vet this week. He had been
licking the same spot on his chest over a day or so and when I had a feel –
there was a painful and on closer
inspection a smelly lump – an infected abscess. I thought he had seemed off his
food for the last couple of days and then recalled that about a week previously
I had heard cat screeching going on when Gingernut was outside late one
evening. When I opened the door to investigate he had come tearing in like a
bat out of hell all puffed up like an over inflated croquette potato.
So I borrowed a cat
basket and parked him in the back of the car. Wending our way to Sligo along
the winding roads, he was calm but uneasy, emitting a mournful mew every now
and then. The vet squeezed his abscess and gave him an antibiotic shot in the
neck. I tried not to cry as poor Gingernut’s mouth gaped and trembled against
the vet’s rough tweedy jacket as he squeezed and squeezed. Tremulously I raised some concerns that he
had been off his food and his coat looked a bit dull. “Ah he’s a grand lump of
a cat, he’ll be fine” the vet said merrily as he kindly carried Gingernut in
his cat box out to my car, parked just in front of his practice.
Once back at home
Gingernut was no worse for wear. However for the rest of the day he would give
somewhat puzzled glances at the cat box stowed in a corner and then glance over
at myself. He put me in mind of a documentary I once saw of people convinced they had been
abducted by aliens and taken away to a place somewhere in Space to have strange acts performed on them , telling tales of how
they had tubes inserted into various orifices and
injections given and electrodes being placed all over them etc. They had that same puzzled expression on
their faces as Gingernut , the same air of having been transported somewhere strange and then deposited rather abruptly back to their familiar surroundings.
For
a change this week I went for a run along Rosses Point instead of along the
lanes at the back of my house. Rosses Point is one of the beaches on the Sligo
coast.
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| View of Oyster Island from Rosses Point |
I ran for about half an hour starting at the Protestant church, along
the promenade with a view over to Oyster Island. It seems a corncrake has been
heard there the last couple of years in the summer. Then a bracing trot along
the beach with the Donegal Mountains mistily blue in the distance. On my way
back a bleary, relentless drizzle began and a somewhat watery sun disappeared.
I was approaching once again the Protestant church which lay at one end of a
small inlet which contained a wrecked, half submerged boat.
Out of the corner of my
eye I saw a white wading bird. It took me a few seconds but the penny did
eventually drop. There are no native white wading birds in Ireland. I was near
the car and raced for my binoculars. Excitedly I peered through and saw what I
had secretly thought it might be.... a Little Egret
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| Little Egret |
The much lauded film
Lincoln was on at the cinema. I went to see it with someone in the comfy,
homely independent cinema in Carrick -on- Shannon a town on the banks of the River Shannon in South Leitrim. Daniel Day Lewis played Abraham Lincoln who at
practically the midnight hour in January 1865 managed to obtain passage for the
13th Amendment in the USA which would formally abolish slavery in
the country. I had heard somewhere way back that initially Daniel Day Lewis was
criticised because he insisted on playing Lincoln with what had apparently been
Lincoln’s true reedy voice. Others wanted him to present a rather one
dimensional version of the president with a strong, thrilling voice– i.e.: it goes hand in hand that great orators MUST
have a booming, thrilling voice.
While the Revolution of
1776 to get the Brits out of the USA created the United States of America the
Civil War of 1861 – 1865 determined what kind of nation it would be. It
resolved 2 fundamental questions of whether the USA was to be a loose
confederation of states (Confederacy) or one nation with a sovereign national
government (Union) and whether this nation born of a declaration that all men
were created with an equal right to Liberty would continue to exist as the
largest slave holding country in the world. So the Civil War started because of uncompromising
differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national
government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become
states. When Abraham Lincoln won the election in 1860 as the first Republican president
on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven states
deep in he south opted out and formed a new nation – the Confederate States of
America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the northern part of
the USA refused to recognise this new confederacy. They feared that it would
discredit democracy due to these states keeping slavery and also create a fatal
precedent that would eventually fragment the no longer United States into
several, small squabbling countries. So Northern victory in the Civil war
preserved the United States and ended the institution of slavery that had
divided the country from its beginning.
Interestingly it appears
that Lincoln was not as stoically and altruistically anti – slavery as he has
been presented. Although as a poor farmer’s boy in the southern state of
Kentucky and so exposed to slavery and thus seeing its effects he had a huge
distaste for it. However as much as he hated the institution of slavery Lincoln
didn’t see the Civil war as a struggle to free the nation’s 4 million slaves
from bondage. Emancipation when it came
would have to be gradual and the most important thing to do in his view was to
prevent the Southern rebellion from severing the Union permanently. But as the
Civil War entered its second summer in 1862, thousands of slaves had fled
Southern plantations to Union lines and the federal government didn’t have a
clear policy on how to deal with them. Emancipation, Lincoln saw would further
undermine the Southern Confederacy while providing the Union with a new source
of manpower to crush the rebellion.
So it is good to see that
these great figures are as human and multi dimensional as the rest of us and sometimes
great acts are not always born out of great altruism but like so many aspects of
life, opportunism, pragmatism and compromise for a win- win situation can lie
at the base.
I felt rather strange watching
the film, as if I was someone from another planet looking down at the life of people
whose future I already knew because I was living it. I remember a part at the
beginning of the film where Lincoln was talking to a Union African/American
soldier who boldly announced to the president that a black man would one day
get the vote. He spoke as if it would be a miracle for this to happen. Peering at the screen over my super sized bag
of M&Ms I had such a strange feeling as if I was an alien from another
planet watching life unfold on Earth. I wanted to reach through the screen and
shake that man’s shoulders and tell him joyously that I knew how all this would
end. That his dreams would cross all frontiers and touch galaxies that he could
never have even dreamt of. That not only did African/Americans get the vote but so much more. One day like in Star Trek when the narrator at the beginning of each
series would say in his eerily disembodied voice “Space: the final frontier......
to boldly go where no man has gone before”
a young, lanky, rather shy, studious
looking African/American man would
become president of the USA with his wife descended from slaves standing beside him.
And by doing that, he would show the whole world how to cross those
seemingly limitless frontiers that
exist in our minds by saying “Yes we can”
“The dogmas of the past are inadequate for the stormy present..... as
our case is new so we must think anew and act anew” (Abraham Lincoln)
Forgive the Past
Live the Present
Create the Future
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