1. Colette, Bill, Diane, and I had a serious session on ZOOM today. I had serious matters on my mind. Listening to Masha Geesen's book, Rachel Maddow's podcast, to Leah Sottile's podcasts, and watching documentaries about Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City have been sobering. Colette's father recently died and she's faced other stressful situations at home and at work because of medicine shortages. I can't speak for Bill, Diane, and Colette, but the podcasts and documentaries I've been absorbing and the difficulties Colette has been up against both with hospital care for her father and medicine shortages that affect students she works with and her daughter, leave me able to comprehending views of and difficulties in our world that I do not understand.
I especially enjoyed one of our diversions from discussing the world's difficulties: Diane informed us of the history of the board game, Monopoly! I discovered I had about 1,000,274 misconception about the game's origin! I'm still reeling from how wrong I was about the few things I thought I knew.
2. Carol and Paul hosted this week's family dinner. We pooled some money as a family and the Roberts made an order at Wah Hing and we enjoyed a Chinese food buffet as a way of celebrating the Lunar New Year. The variety of entrees and appetizers staggered me -- our buffet included crab puffs, egg rolls, potstickers, fried rice, prawns, different chicken offerings, other seafood, and more -- good tasty fun!
3. Back home, Debbie decided to go to bed really early -- she continues to recover from a cold.
I decided to continue my quest to learn more about what's known as the extremist right wing movement and watched Frontline's updated version of the documentary film, "American Insurrection", released on January 4, 2022. The movie's correspondent, A.C. Thompson, did a ton of leg work. He was in Charlottesville during the August, 2017 Unite the Right rally. He interviewed, face to face, several people involved in demonstrations and violence. He talked to people in the Boogaloo movement, militia members, and others who voiced their commitment to overthrowing what they experience as the tyranny of the U. S. government by way of violent revolution. The two days at Charlottesville were almost like a rehearsal. Their efforts intensified during times of Covid restriction and in response to Black Lives Matter marches and demonstrations. Their commitment to violence climaxed at the U. S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
I listened intently to every interview. I could comprehend what I heard, but I can't pretend to understand.
I took a break, for a while, from the subject of these ideologies and this violence and turned my attention to an hour long documentary, Dick Cavett's Watergate. In the immediate aftermath of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, Dick Cavett was one of the only persons on television, whether news people or talk show hosts, who took the break in seriously and talked with guests on his show about it. As time progressed, he became increasingly involved in questioning guests about the scandal. This documentary encapsulates Cavett's work, highlights some of it, and features interviews done in around 2014 in which different people like Bob Woodward, John Dean, Carl Bernstein, and others look back on the story and reflect upon it with perspective gained with so much passing of time.
When I finally settled down and went to bed, I started listening to another podcast by Leah Sottile. She created it in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting and Longreads and it's a two season exploration of the Bundy family called Bundyville. I didn't get too far into it before I fell asleep. I plan on listening to this when I'm awake and see if I can further comprehend the deep current of anti-government emotion and action that exists in the USA.
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