Painting by: Eaton Hamilton 2024

9×12″ oil on oil board

ID: Woman w greying hair in 3/4 view, done in oranges and greens (and some blues)

Ah, good friends, when the verdict came in this week, and I was watching live and began to sob out loud. I didn’t realize how pent up I had been about justice delayed and denied over the last 8 years, not just with that appalling bigot, but generally as the world turns increasingly fascist while we repeat our hugest mistakes of the past.

How horrible right-wing govts are. How they ruin places. What would progress look like without them? Dr Martin Luther King Jr would be correct saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” That’s the world he saw brightly shining before he was slaughtered. I don’t see that world, but for just a minute after the verdict this week, I did, I did. Finally something swung toward justice.

I have introduced my dog not only to speech buttons now but to her “cuddle friend,” a stuffy dog with a heartbeat. She jumps up, I turn on the dog’s heart, turn off the light and pet her while we chill out a few minutes. At first I kept taking my blood pressure during/after and it was impossibly low. That thing works! It was for her, but it has ended up being for me too. Today I gave her a duplicate of a stuffed animal she loved to tear apart and she was so thrilled, and fetched it a number of times before dedicatedly trying to disembowel it. She finally concluded with her button that says, “I love my human.”