Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 72. Sunrise is 7:15 and sunset is 6:02 for 10 hours 47 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 76.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1805, a British fleet led by Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet under Admiral Villeneuve in the Battle of Trafalgar.
I’ll set aside for today a plan to begin considering the conventional topics of the October 20 session of the Whitewater Common Council. A different and ugly part of last night’s meeting occupies my thoughts. For today — only an oblique consideration of an old saying.
There is an expression that someone once told me was Norwegian but that is, in fact, Japanese: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down (Deru kugi wa utareru).
Sometimes, yes: A community will often favor imposed conformity, hierarchy, and group harmony. When someone seeks to advance an equal right in society, for an individual or a minority group, others will say, “Why can’t you talk about this somewhere else, sometime else, in a quieter voice?”
It’s as though a Black man should sit and talk privately with his Klansman antagonist. Couldn’t the two of them simply sit together and work it all out?
(I am not, myself, a member of any vulnerable minority group. There are no vulnerable white, male, straight, libertarian lawyers. None.)
Individuals exercising their right to gather with others in free assembly are told either that they shouldn’t have done so or that they may do so only under conditions applied selectively (and irrationally).
There is a hopeful, modern opposite of this old expression: Nails protruding far enough become too difficult to hammer down.
Every so often someone will ask me if I should like to join with those self-special few — elected, appointed, or self-appointed — who occasionally reveal themselves as the hammerers of nails.
No and never.