Postcard from Minnesota
By: Susie Kaufman
You’d think a forecast of full sun in early June would guarantee a long day of strolling in the park, inching forward towards the solstice. You’d expect dappled light and cerulean skies, emerald grass and plantings of purple iris. Think ducks and geese padding around after their young.
But the cheery little round yellow sun icon on the weather app is divorced from the actual weather. This is not because it’s been replaced by dark clouds or rain showers, but because hundreds of wildfires burning out of control and displacing tens of thousands in two of Canada’s Prairie provinces, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, have brought smoke that covers the sun and leaves the sky a greyish white non-color where I live in Minnesota.
Fire and smoke do not respect borders of course, and depending on where we live we share in their effects and misery. Our neighbours to the north are dealing with all of the loss and attendant difficulties of an emergency of this magnitude, but Canada’s governments, both provincial and federal, have worked together to respond to the situation, offering support to displaced communities. Their cooperation stands in stark contrast to our current administration’s trashing of FEMA.
The hot dry conditions that accompany climate change are ideal tinder for the increasing number of fires happening on both sides of our borders, and globally. Climate change predates the MAGA regime by decades, of course. But there’s something Trumpian about the smoke descending. Like the wool being pulled over the eyes of those Americans who thought they were electing a Lancelot in chain mail who would ride up on a white steed and root out fraud and waste returning us to a fairy tale of civic probity.
They expected a leader who would bring back a time when men were men and all the women looked like Ivanka. Imagine their dismay when the emperor turned out to be not only a naked omnivore, but a criminally negligent buffoon, a man who apparently doesn’t know emoluments from linoleum. Things are seldom what they seem.
Men and women in black robes, previously arbiters of justice who were charged with passing on the constitutionality of laws and the extent to which they were being properly observed, are now dangerous radicals, the enemy of the state. Jews in the diaspora who are averse to the slaughter of civilians are accused of antisemitism, while the president pals around with Holocaust deniers and terrorists wreak havoc in Washington and Boulder.
How do we sort this out? In small towns like Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the center of my life for fifty years, a Norman Rockwell fantasy unfolds every day. The flag flies, a ten-year-old plays Little League, hamburgers and hot dogs are grilled, and then one day, say last Friday, ICE agents abduct a gardener from the parking lot of a construction design business owned by two people who drew up the plans for the extension to my house.
I look at the photos of these gorillas in riot gear marching around in what was for so long my hometown, and it doesn’t add up.
I just stare at those pictures in disbelief.
Retired hospice chaplain and archivist, Susie Kaufman, is the author of Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement. Her focus has always been on lifting up people's stories and seeing them in the context of the larger story that embraces all of us.
The contrast between your lovely town and what you just witnessed is jarring. I pray that others will be prompted to act in protest (as millions did this past weekend) and to voice their views and concerns as you have eloquently done. Thank you, Susie, for contributing to our POSTCARD project.
Our world is indeed shrouded in dark, choking smoke both real and metaphysical. We struggle with you to hold on to our inherent decency and compassion in the wildfires that rage around us.
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