Today is set aside to remember and celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, probably the most outstanding campaigner in favor of civil rights for all since Frederick Douglas, and maybe of all time.
So I spent the morning making a Quiche Lorrain and pondering reality and our current society.
I made the quiche because, despite all our opposition, the Husband heads back into one of the university's downtown buildings tomorrow to barricade himself in his office, perform his assigned tasks, and then await my picking him up in the afternoon. I'm furious, of course. We take additional risks and spend extra money to satisfy a bureaucratic whim. But there's nothing to be done. No one looks for another job when they're close to retiring from the present one.
A Quiche will let us have one more extensive lunch together today and give us leftovers I can send with him in his tiffin for lunch the next day.
And making the quiche helped the disgorgement effort as it allowed me to empty my long-term flour storage bin in the hall closet. I've kept this five-gallon bucket at least half full of flour since we moved in over three decades ago, buying it inexpensively online in ten-pound bags. Now I've washed the container out and placed it with the other things destined to Goodwill. From now until we leave, I will buy just enough flour for the kitchen pantry. There's no more need to purchase and store more long-term.
There's something deeply sobering about doing this, selling up, clearing out, and emigrating. Somehow, seeing the bottom of the long-term flour container sparked that feeling today. Because while we're moving for a host of personal reasons, such as growth, a better quality of life, a desire for adventure, we're also leaving because we don't feel welcome here any longer.
Barack Obama's elections in 2008 and 2012 weren't the culmination of our nation's drawn-out trial over racial, social, and economic equality; they were a challenge to us. While well more than half of us demonstrated our willingness to choose an African-American man to be President, not once but twice, a significant number of us hardened our opposition to not only the idea of an African-American national leader but to all the progress toward equality we have made over the previous six decades.
It's not just that Americans of European descent are dropping as a percentage of the national population; it's that the long-standing privileges that their majority access to power has given them might be going away. Hence the backlashed country that the Husband and I no longer recognize and where we no longer feel confident of our future. One of life's most essential survival skills is knowing when to move on, so we're assured in our decision to leave even as we feel sad over some people and things we will leave behind.
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