Daily Bread for 3.30.22: Whitewater’s Still Part of America

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see rain with a high of 58.  Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 7:19 PM for 12h 40m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 3.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1867, the United States purchases Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, or about 2-cent/acre.

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One needn’t have studied geography to know that Whitewater is part of Wisconsin, and Wisconsin is a part of America. This truth is in our postal address: Whitewater, Wisconsin. There is, as it turns out, no Kingdom of Whitewater (but to be candid the town does have a few would-be court jesters). Whitewater is so much a part of these larger jurisdictions that officeholders take an oath to uphold federal and state law, and will rise for a Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of principal public meetings. They position themselves in the direction of an American flag when they recite this pledge.

These words are meant to mean more to those professing them than an avenue to take office.

(The American flag, by the way, is the one with “thirteen equal horizontal stripes of red (top and bottom) alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the canton (referred to specifically as the “union”) bearing fifty small, white, five-pointed  stars arranged in nine offset horizontal rows, where rows of six stars (top and bottom) alternate with rows of five stars. The 50 stars on the flag represent the 50 U.S. states, and the 13 stripes represent the thirteen British colonies that declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and became the first states in the U.S.” It’s lawful — as it should be — to display variations, but I’ve never felt the need to display any version other than the genuine article.)

In America, that place of which Whitewater is a part, there is an ongoing reckoning with those who advanced election lies, and those who cheered or actively supported insurrection and sedition against the United States.

One cannot honestly move on, etc., if one does honestly acknowledge where one has been. Truth and reconciliation begins with truth, after all.  (The Confederates wanted America to move on, so to speak, and our forefathers obliged them too readily, denying future generations both truth and reconciliation.)

PBS Frontline’s Plot to Overturn the Election describes the fundamental truth of violence against the constitutional order.