Molly McKew: The sacred American spaces desecrated by the American president

[Nevilledog]

https://www.greatpower.us/p/the-sacred-american-spaces-desecrated?utm_medium=ios

With a name like McKew, you can guess that my family was Catholic — Catholic on both sides, all the way down, as is often the case. As children, my sister and I were put in Catholic school — education was extremely important to my parents, Idaho public schools were behind in major areas, and Catholic schools were really the only alternative. But even with kind teachers instructing us the on softest, most-cleaned-up, golden-rule version of Catholicism, there was — when it came to my young mind, at least — a major ideological competitor: Idaho itself.

We grew up wild, remote, far from extended family, running in mountain cathedrals and in drought-stricken valleys, baking in the high-desert sun by day and mesmerized by the Milky Way in the heat-starved nights, always tracking the dust or snow of Idaho back into the house when we returned. We marveled at the wide painted skies of the high-west sunrises and sunsets, watching each one like an act of worship in a half-settled place. Native flowers were rare in the drought years of our childhood, and when spotted — transcendent, alien, starkly beautiful against the sage and the rocks, unique to this place which felt out of time.

Whatever school tried to say was spiritual, we found a hundred-fold in the wilderness we lived adjacent to. I used to look off the edge of the bluff our neighborhood was on and wonder how it was that the mountains vaulted so far into the sky and yet the western heavens were so much more vast and unreachable than those our east coast family lived beneath.

I think we Americans — looking down now into our phones and enrapt by the psychological terror the algorithms are designed to wield on us — often forget how utterly, spectacularly, heartbreakingly beautiful our country is. How it must have been astonishingly, mindbendingly miraculous for those first generations of foreign settlers who arrived — traversing Atlantic seas with fish and whales so dense you could “walk across their backs;” walking beneath towering Eastern old growth forests full of game and dappled with rich, open farmland; crossing the sweeping multi-hued plains with its endless empty horizons and rivers of buffalo; climbing the high-west mountains and deserts and red rocks and streaked canyons; and finally tumbling out into the sunset Pacific and its array of bounties up and down the coast.

*snip*

[lastlib]

1. The Felon desecrates the White House simply by his occupancy of it.

That's ON TOP of the destruction he wrought on the East Wing and the Rose Gardens.