It’s kind of amazing, more than two centuries into our Highly Imperfect Union, what a dangerous idea democracy remains.

You’d think we’d be settled with it by now. At the very least, you’d think we’d understand it. Or maybe we do understand it, which is why we’re not settled with it.

We got that impression after being gaslighted over our morning coffee last week.

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Let us pause to consider what an extraordinary moment we’re in.

If you’re of a certain age — ours or older, at this point — you’ll recall what a slog South Africa divestment was: Krugerrands, Sun City, years of effort to isolate apartheid from world commerce.

And here we are, barely a week into Georgia’s Jim Crow reboot, and we’re looking at almost 200 companies already making noise against it, many via something called the Civic Alliance.

It ain’t just Major League Baseball. It ain’t just Georgia homies Delta, Coca-Cola, and Home Depot, either. Salesforce? Target? Uber?

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The city of Boulder is about a half-hour drive from where we sit. It’s a college town to Denver’s metropolis, population around 106,000.

We grew up in a town like that, in Oregon. It’s how we figured out Colorado when we moved here almost six years ago: College town, metropolis, vast hinterlands, snowy mountains. No ocean, of course, and plenty of other differences when you look closer, but good enough to be getting on with.

We were still living in college-town Eugene when one of the first school shootings took place, next door, in Springfield. Everyone remembers Columbine (twenty-minute drive to our south), but West Paducah, Kentucky (1997) and Thurston High School (1998) preceded it.

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The first thing white people did upon hearing about the latest slaughter was to argue whether it was racist.

You’d think that was a no-brainer: While male murderer, Asian female victims. You’d think, after a year of a racist President racializing a pandemic, after reports for months of random attacks on Asian Americans, something like this would be easily, if sorrowfully, understood.

You’d think that. Unless you were white, apparently.

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We doing this? Really?

We’re all for a Return to Normalcy, and sure, millions of Americans are getting injected with spytech nanobots by the day, but we thought the party doesn’t start until this summer when the Roaring Twenties come back, or, to use a more personal reference, the Disco Seventies.

Just you wait. You’re thinking Flappers, but our bet’s on Toga Parties.

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• Trees of green
• Red roses too
• Skies of blue

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We watched Jungle Book the other day, the first time we’ve seen it since it came out more than fifty years ago. We’re deeply familiar with the soundtrack — we wore the grooves off the album as a kid — but the movie itself, just two viewings, bookending our life to date.

A lot has happened in between.

So much so that Disney+ felt compelled to post a content warning before the movie started, saying not only that some character depictions were less than salutary, but the creators should have known better at the time and did it anyway.

That got our attention.

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