Another meh day. This pandemic shit is starting to weigh on me
It was a lovely day weather-wise, though. I think it got up to 23, and felt warmer. I stupidly wore tight jeans instead of shorts when I went out for my afternoon walk.
It was nice in the morning too when I got out for my exercise, accompanied, as always, by Mr. Douglass. I noticed, looking at the Libby app on my phone, that I still have 10 hours of listening on this book!
Today, I mostly heard about the man's political maneuvering at the end of the 1860s and early 1870s. He endorsed Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and "radical" - i.e. abolitionist - Republican. Grant was challenged by a new, more conservative wing of the party that was allying itself with the hated (at least by Douglass) Democrats, advocating for reconciliation with the south.
Douglass was still editing The New National Era, which would be a relatively short-lived newspaper that employed his sons and good friend Ottilie Assing. In the paper, he wrote editorials advocating Grant as the Republican nominee, and attacking Grant's challenger, Horace Greeley.
Douglass, in this period, openly coveted a government appointment. The first he received was a minor role in a Senate commission of inquiry into annexing the Dominican Republic and making it a state. The country had been partly settled by black immigrants from the U.S. in the early 1800s. Grant's idea was that some present-day U.S. blacks might also find a home there. And it would create a new block of voters, virtually all black, that would undoubtedly vote Republican. Democrats and the Greeley Republicans were opposed, as were many radical abolitionists.
Douglass was appointed one of two assistant secretaries to support the white political big-wigs who were the actual commissioners. They travelled to Hispaniola and interviewed people on the island and in government
Many of Douglass's former allies and friends criticized him for participating in this project, pointing out that he had always been opposed to the idea of "colonization," the notion that freed blacks could be got rid of by sending them off to some place in the Caribbean or South or Central America. He insisted that the people of the Dominican wanted to be annexed, and there is some evidence this was true. But it never came to fruition.
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My afternoon walk was perhaps longer than it needed to be. I didn't have a great night of sleep, or at least not a long enough sleep.
I walked over to the forks, across the foot bridge, down along the west side of the north branch and up by the Children's Museum, then down the hill to the river. Just before the underpass under the railway tracks, I veered off down a little path, unpaved, that stays on this side of the tracks and runs along the river.
I could hear a bunch of young guys coming up behind me, and finally stepped aside to let them pass. There were three of them, all in fatigues lugging great big packs on their backs. Were they real military, wannabes or survivalists of some kind? No idea. I walked a half kilometer or so down the path, then turned and went back by a slightly different route to the forks.
I didn't take any pictures until I got to the old courthouse, where a still-fresh magnolia - most around downtown are finished - caught my attention. And then I couldn't resist another shot of the Justice building. I'm not sure what it is that is so appealing about this really awful building.
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I also continued working on pics from 2012 trip to New York. On one of our first days after Caitlin joined us, she and Aaron went off on their own and Karen and I poked around Brooklyn, ending up at the small but pleasant Botanical Gardens.
Another day, we trained into Manhattan. I took some shots underground. This last shows why I keep going back to my raw picture files. It's one that was pretty badly under-exposed. It looked like there was nothing there. But digital photography is very forgiving and Photoshop has some marvelous tools for making silk purses out of photographic sows' ears. When I started playing around with it today, I found this, which I think is kind of interesting.
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