Smacked by a freeze

But warm enough by noon. And sunny!

YESTERDAY MORNING, I found the birdbath frozen over, first time this season. Must have been a soft freeze because the banana trees weren’t burned too badly.

Overnight freezes are common in winter, and it always warms up quickly after the sun rises, but they still do damage to the yard, sometimes severe.

Around noon, I sat a spell on the yard patio, putting my footsie up on one of the web chairs for you to see. It was lovely out. Nary a cloud, and the sun was nice and warm.

Today is Three Kings’ Day, which is when kiddies get their gifts in Latin America. I wish it were otherwise. I wish they got gifts from Santa instead because then we’d have just two traffic-jammed, abutting holidays instead of dragging it out another week for the Trio of Kings to come on camels, a real pain in the keister.

By today, even Mexican adults have had it up to here, but then they do it all over again the next year. Sometimes I think self-abuse is a genetic trait of my (relatively) new paisanos. Luckily, I was not born here, which gives me a saner approach to it all.

Let us now forge on to Carnival and Easter Week and beyond!

For Carnival, which is a dreadful mob scene in our ramshackle barrio, the worst place in town to be, we’ll be enjoying a great getaway in Guanajuato.

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(Monday morning update! It froze again last night. Oh, dear.)

The race obsession

WERE IT NOT so disruptive and destructive, the seething obsession with race in the United States would be hilarious.

Do most nations do this? No. It exists almost exclusively in the white man’s world, and it’s something the white man is doing to himself, self-abuse, gleefully abetted by blacks.

Are citizens daily hurling accusations of racism at fellow citizens in China, Russia, Bolivia, Kenya, Israel, ad nauseam? Of course not.

Slavery caused it, you might say. But slavery existed in South America too. Slavery has existed throughout human history in almost all corners of the globe, and it still exists in some zones.  People with all manner of skin tones, including white people, have been slaves.

Yet this perpetual hurling of “You’re a racist!” is almost exclusively contained nowadays in societies dubbed liberal democracies.

It is a political tool used by leftists. Sure, conservatives fling it on occasion too, but that’s because it’s a filthy habit they’ve picked up from leftists. It’s become so common that everybody uses it. It’s now a late-stage cancer eating the innards of society.

The cancer is not racism itself — not at all — but the constant hurling of the epithet and the grievous damage it’s causing.

Racism is part of human nature, and always will be. People, many of whom are not too bright, look askance at those who are different. You will never, ever stop this. You must live with it, and try to ease its effects as much as possible, occasionally with sensible laws.

Tragically, the racism epithet is rotting American society, and it’s a dreadful thing to witness from down where I live.

Were it possible, I would come up there and rap you all across the knuckles with a hardwood cane. I would do it until you’re bloody and howling with pain. It would be good and just.