Matching Tracksuits

Day: September 20, 2020

A Walk and First Bonfire

Sunday 20 September 2020

In the afternoon, we took the dog to the dog park. It’s not that we felt she needed the exercise; rather, we felt she needed some canine socialization. We couldn’t go to our favorite park without a walk, though, so after the dog had had enough (or rather, we’d had enough), we headed out for a short jaunt.

We likely would have made a bit longer walk of it had our favorite park not recently banned pets and bikes from the unpaved areas. K emailed the park administration about it, and they explained that it was due to a number of complaints about off-leash dogs and crazed cyclists who put others at risk and damage the flora. But the thing is, K pointed out on our walk today, we rarely saw others on the off-road trails. There were a couple of more-popular trails that had more traffic, but by and large, we were the only ones we ever saw there.

There is a certain temptation to say, “Forget it — we don’t damage anything, and we wouldn’t dream of letting Clover off-leash, so we’re going to walk the trails anyway.” But we follow rules even when we don’t like them. (Insert political comment here.)

After the walk, we let the kids play on the playground a bit. The biggest kid got a kick out of trying to do the same tricks the middle kid did.

To top off the weekend, we had the first bonfire of the autumn 2020 season.

Exempt

Sunday 20 September 2020

Churches are exempt from paying taxes; political organizations are not. All too often, though, the former morph into the latter, and it’s for that reason that many of us feel that churches should not enjoy tax-exempt status. Usually, priests and pastors couch these statements in less obviously political language. It fools no one, and of course, the congregants generally support that language and their perceived right to say it in an organization that pays no taxes — it’s seen as first amendment rights.

So to be present when blatantly political speech takes place in the context of prayer makes someone who holds the above views quite irate.

Today, we went to mass at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a church that we’ve attended a few times, and probably would attend more often given the difficulty of signing up for one of the available slots at our parish’s reduced-capacity masses. But I for one will not set foot in that building again after the blood-boiling nonsense I heard today. During the general intercessions, when it came time for the priest to add his intentions, he prayed for Trump and his pick for the Supreme Court position. I really wanted to walk out at that point, but I remained. It wasn’t as if he were thanking his god — which I put in lower-case, for it seems to be the god of political power — for the death of Ginsberg; he was merely supporting the hypocrisy of the right. Given the historical hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that a priest would promote and praise political hypocrisy in the name of maintaining power.

As the mass was ending, though, during the time just before the benediction when the priest usually makes announcements, he launched into another political speech about the importance of the Supreme Court nomination. I’d had enough. I walked out.