My goodness, where has the ….
My goodness, where has the time gone? It seems like we just started the new year and here we are almost to the end of January.
The sun is now setting after five and the morning sunrise is gaining enough to be noticeable. At over two minutes a day, by the end of February, we will really be noticing the gain in daylight.
January is also proving to be very mild and snowless. We can still get plenty of both, but the warmth of the sun should help us through the rest of the winter.
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Not that there hasn’t been enough going on in January to keep us on edge. There was the riot at the Nation’s Capitol on the sixth to make it a day in history we will all remember.
Then there was the inauguration which seemed to have everyone waiting. Waiting for the former president to leave and the first lady vice president ever to be sworn into office.
But wait, there was something else that popped up in the news. It was a man by the name of Charles Curtiss. Who was he? He was vice president for Herbert Hoover. As is the case with most vice presidents, after they serve their term, they are generally long gone and forgotten.
When all the talk about a lady vice president started, someone came up with the name of Mr. Curtis. Seems he was born in what was then the Kansas Territory and his mother was a member of the Kaw Nation. He represented the State of Kansas in the House of Representatives and the U. S. Senate then became the vice president for Hoover. That made him the first Native American to serve as Vice President.
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We suffer through the pandemic while a lot of things are cancelled or changed around. Not always better, but different and sometimes finding we had come jumped out with an answer. At least temporarily. For example, we have cancelled morning worship temporarily at Trinity, but now every Thursday comes a letter from Pastor Dan telling us about the special service on Facebook on Sunday and then again Sunday morning. It isn’t like going to church, but neither would it seem like church without singing and not having the ability to mingle with friends after church.
On the plus side we found out many who aren’t able or haven’t been attending are tuning into the Sunday worship. As a result, we are now reaching far more than had been attending before the pandemic.
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So it was with the inauguration last week. While we didn’t have the huge crowds, like some argued over which was the biggest crowd, the planners came up with things that were different, more emphasis was placed on them.
One of those on the program was a young lady by the name of Amanda Gorman who is only 22 years old, but now recognized as a great poet. Probably what is unique is that she at one time had a speaking problem, but like our new President, was able to overcome it. We also saw the story of the young lad that our President encountered one time and how he helped him overcome the problem.
Not only is Kamala Harris our first lady Vice President, she is the daughter of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, she worked her way through college and held a number of important positions before running for the United States Senate. Now her replacement in the senate, also from California, is the first Latino to serve in that body.
While thousands of pictures were taken that day, I like the one someone took of President Biden and his wife Jill standing in the window of the White House watching the fireworks going off at the end of a historic day.
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If that wasn’t enough firsts going around this week, there is the story of Sarah Thomas. If you watched any football this fall you probably saw her in her referee uniform running up and down the sidelines with her blond ponytail flying in the wind. She has now been announced as the first lady official to work the Super Bowl.
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I don’t know how many of you read the lengthy article in last week’s TRG about Wisconsin’s elections and how we protect the system to make sure no one votes that isn’t supposed to. The article points out there are 1,850 town, village and city clerks who are trained to run the elections and each year they meet to discuss any changes to the law.
Yes, there can be problems. For many years Florence served on the county’s canvassing board which always met after every election to certify that all the regulations were followed. If there was a problem it was probably some clerk who hadn’t kept updated with the changes, or failed to follow them. I recall one town, an election official from the town of Mayville, way up in the northeast corner of the county, had to drive all the way to Neillsville to correct an error. The canvassing board probably could have overlooked it, but they didn’t.
Elections are a common thing here in Wisconsin. Matter of fact there will be a primary spring election in less than two weeks. Sometimes these elections don’t have a large turnout and someone might suggest they be done away with. I recall one thing at a meeting someone was explaining that. Winston Churchill said, one day, democracy is a very a poor system of government. However, there is none better.
