Honk Country -- Horrid Day

It's the wind. It's so sharp and cold, so strong, so loud. It roars as if one were in the Rockies instead of at sea level. It's making me crazy. At least I'm not in NYC where even some of the subways went out -- with passengers stuck in the cars -- for over 12 hours. That never happens, or hardly ever. This storm did it.


Starting to get a bit cabin fevered. Guess I'll retire up to the Sun Room and read about the failure of Canadian invasions by us in the War of 1812.

Still and all this is a pretty intense time-traveling experience ... here in a land where you can see the generationally gathered and expanded wealth and power of particular families still in effect after centuries. I've never lived before with this constant and familiar awareness of class and wealth distinction between Them and me. Where I grew up didn't even become a state until centuries after these still ruling families first arrived here, so it the power and class differential wasn't so glaring. Also, when I was growing up, we lived in a meritocracy and expanding economy, i.e. a time of taken-for-granted upward mobility if you were educated and worked hard..

Now el V's Huguenot forebears got here right at the end of the 17th, start of the 18th centuries -- landed first in Virginia, as did so many. However, his ancestors did not gather unto themselves generations of wealth and power. Obvious, that. Because if they had we two would never have met and married, as neither did my ancestors gather wealth and power for generations.

With the achievements in health care and medical knowledge some of our current masters may well be living a century and a half, maybe longer. This contributes only to more concentration of wealth and power for them, and less and less for the rest of us.

I'm getting a fair sense of what it must have been like for most of us in those European lands that grew out of feudalism, how effectively blocked most people felt to ever have a life better than the one ordained to them by the accident of who their family was. We're going back to that. O, not in form or political structures, but in effective social separation of classes, lack of social mobility, denial of rights, shutting down of educational and other opportunities. While of course, if you're DuPont or a Caroll or a Slidell or a Raisin or Despeaux (who came from Haiti with much property including many slaves), etc. you are still doing well, in fact, you're getting richer every year.