1) Yesterday my thread went kinda crazy. I was doing what so many people like me were to do to contend with the high, emotions triggered by a raging, red-faced patriarch throwing a tantrum about being denied his birth right. I highly recommend Alanon for those who can relate!
2) What is striking to me this morning watching the committee vote is that it's as though none of yesterday actually happened, at least not in terms of the substance of what we are hearing. The only difference is in degree not in content.
3) Whatever everyone was before yesterday, they are that today, only more so. The folks who went into the hearing angry are raging and volcanic today. The folks who went in hurt, vulnerable and sad, are broken-hearted and despairing today.
4) We shouldn't have gotten our hopes up that the outcome would be any different. Again, we should have been looking to Alanon for support before we turned on our sets yesterday. Alanon could have told us how it would all unfold.
5) I hate to break it to you guys, but we seem to be in an abusive relationship. Those of us who want to approach things with sincerity and good faith listened to Dr Ford and they heard a fellow traveler, someone who'd been hurt and wanted to turn her pain into something worthy.
6) Those of us who feel that business needs to get done with less sturm and drang, with less time wasted on emotion, those who feel that important things have nothing to do with feelings, and that any attempt to bring your pain to bear on the discussion are just distractions.
7) Politically, we are all in grave trouble. Everyone just spent the last two days getting more certain of what they already believed. In fact that is pretty much true of everything that's been happening for a long time, since long before the orangutan took office.
8) If you strip everything back to its essence, people who went in inclined to believe her believe her more. People who went in inclined to believe him believed him more. If you listen to everything everyone has said since, none of it is terribly unreasonable, really.
9) When John Cornyn invokes "Have you no sense of decency" I feel so angry and indignant, but if I thought what he thought, he would sound like a heroic voice of moral clarity to me.
10) Likewise when Durbin links Ford's testimony to the rise of the MeToo movement and talks about women's pain, he sounds to the other side like a prevaricating, manipulative shill, exploiting the pain of his brainless followers. To me, it sounds exactly right.
