Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 58. Sunrise is 6:45 and sunset is 7:15, for 12 hours, 30 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1912, First Lady Helen Taft and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, plant two Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., the origin of the National Cherry Blossom Festival.
In a post last week, this libertarian blogger wrote criticizing Sen. Chuck Schumer. That criticism was, and is, deserved. See Schumer Gets the Criticism He Deserves.
Josh Marshall relates an observation that one of Marshall’s friends made of Schumer:
A few days ago a friend told me that Chuck Schumer thinks he’s a minority leader but he’s actually an opposition leader. Or rather that’s the position into which history has placed him — and he doesn’t realize it or he doesn’t grasp the difference or he’s simply not able to be the latter thing. There are lots of ways to explain the disconnect or incapacity. But I thought this was a pretty good one.
Yes. These times, more than within the last three generations, will test understanding and imagination. Some will adjust; others not. Some previously unnoticed will rise to the moment; many prominent until now will fall away.
That’s true nationally, statewide, and it will prove true in Whitewater, also. How odd that even now one has to write this way, warning that a few hidebound men and women will not be able to shelter in local boosterism or positivity in the misapprehension that Whitewater is an island far from turmoil on the mainland.
Watching a community forum of municipal candidates from a few weeks, ago, where the organizers carried on as though we lived in conditions of nonpartisanship1, made so very clear that we are not immune from Schumer’s failure to grasp the moment.
A community that pretends a wolf2 is a sheep soon has fewer sheep.

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- Not even bipartisanship, itself an extinct species, but nonpartisanship. No one profits from these misapprehensions so much as the authoritarian populists. They’re professedly commonsensical only until they can impose their book-banning and closet-confining on others. ↩︎
- Even dimwitted wolves have teeth. ↩︎
A palate cleanser of sorts — Sophia S. Galer on the em dash. (Admittedly, I am a fan of the em dash, so her views suit my preferences.) What makes Galer so compelling, however, is that her intelligence is creative, inquisitive, seeking. Something about which to be hopeful in the generation after mine…