Page 554 - Demo

Fools%u2019 Journey548wide condemnation%u2014except from the United States%u2019 Republican Party, which almost derailed a bill to continue our country%u2019s funding to support Ukraine. At the same time, Israel was carrying out what seemed to be a scorched-earth policy against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. They were basically doing what Putin was doing in Ukraine, yet our country was helping to fund their efforts, despite the United Nations%u2019 International Court of Justice telling Israel to completely halt its military operations because it was becoming an act of genocide. Hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean continued to batter the America%u2019s coastline, a sure sign the climate was continuing to change for the worse. In fact, after hurricane Helene hit Florida%u2019s panhandle, it traveled north, resulting in nearly 100,000 homes in Indiana without power, including ours. The storm also caused a tree to fall onto the electric lines, which blocked our dead-end road and prevented us from leaving. The country was also experiencing an increased frequency of tornado outbreaks, and the area known as Tornado Alley was moving eastward. Sea levels were rising, flooding was more common. And there was little political will to do anything about global warning, an inaction that would be exacerbated in a second Trump term.Lynn and I had each always enjoyed reading the newspaper, but like many locales, our paper, the Bloomington Herald Times, was now owned by the Gannett Co. and the amount of local news was miniscule. A year earlier, our electricity had gone out for four days, and it was barely covered in the paper%u2014and then only after-the-fact, not during the outage. So we had no idea what was going on. We did have a battery-operated radio, but with so many radio stations owned by huge conglomerates based somewhere else, their news coverage was even more abysmal than the newspaper. We did get some updates from our local Public Radio station, but it was negligible. Even in the best of times, we rarely received much in the way of local news, and the majority of our Indiana news came from Indianapolis television stations, whose coverage was dominated by big-city gun violence and murder.In short, from our perspective, almost everything about the world around us was going to hell. We remembered when Republi-