The tour: Unity Pond Pottery, the Amish Charcuterie, the Amish store, the Library, Liberty Graphics, Liberty Tools, Morse's, Washington General, Damariscotta: Reny's, Sherman's Bookstore & Ampersand Cafe, King Eider's Pub, Stone Tree Cidery. All in the rain while tracking the events of the military mutiny in Russia.

Sometimes you have to pause reading one book to read another. The Sampson book is a good summary of how humans evolved into camps, bands, tribes to foster survival and protect from inbreeding. Cooperation and trust and tribal identities are traits selected by evolution because they enhance survival. In the last part of the book he suggests that further tribal evolution may be needed if humans are to survive climate change and other threats. He thinks Rodenberry's StarTrek is a vision of what we might become. He talks about the importance of myth-making in the formation of tribes. Maybe in the future Star Wars will be our old testament and StarTrek will be the new testament and Rodenberry will be considered a prophet.

Unfortunately, in the evolutionary "short run," xenophobia has been an adaptation for human survival; thus it has been imprinted deep within us on a tribal level. But perhaps transcending beyond its boundaries is possible. If we can intentionally nurture our species' capacity to do so, then maybe we can enter a new level of collective human consciousness. Homo sapiens may be at the dawn of a major evolutionary transition. The arc of the tribal universe is long, but it bends toward oneness. Tribalism itself, in all its aspects, may yet be the key to saving the world.

Chris Cooper is the Central Park birder who was made famous when a video of his encounter with a dog-walking karen in the park went viral. He was a comic book writer and now has a TV show and a book. So far I'm learning a lot about birding (way too many warblers) and comic books and Central Park. Physically, he is like a black version of my cousin Craig who died of AIDS in the 80's. My cousin Mark, Craig's younger brother, is the editor of the book.

You're a thread upon the loom
When the spirit walks in the room
-- Bruce Cockburn

In the coolest June in Maine history, when we wear raincoats all the time, life goes on with book sales, maker fairs, brown tail moths, and tents, a lot of tents. The most satisfying thing I've done recently was deconstructing a huge old treadmill that had been taking up space on our screen porch for a couple of years because it was too big to haul away. I used every tool I had to unbolt and unscrew and pry the parts into metal, plastic, and electronic piles, which then went to recycling or trash. Which task led me to declutter and tidy up the workbench and tool collection.

The idea of using the empty Unity College campus to house asylum seekers has reached the proposal stage. Asylees are not so different from college freshmen: they need housing, food, care, classes. Like the students before them, they would mostly be self-contained on campus. A couple of things would make this proposal great for the area: one, the town gets money for extra use of services; two, the federal government gives Maine the requested waiver of the six month waiting period before asylees can work. The available workers would be great for farms and local businesses all over our area. The money that follows them would boost the local economy. The opposition is predictably the same folks who don't like gay pride decorations. The only thing both sides share is that no one trusts the college president.

Markers: Foobar: A metasyntactic variable; narcan training.

If you wanted to write a novel about our town, you wouldn't have to invent any characters. They are all right here, cranky, improbable, opinionated, generous, iconoclastic, irrationally optimistic, backwoods reclusive, curmudgeonly, idealistic, delusional, free-spirited, cultish, conniving, philosophical, clinically fearful, outrage susceptible, backward looking, forward thinking: we have them all, myself included. Events this week have me thinking about two things.
1. stochastic terrorism: "the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted."
2. the tolerance paradox: "The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant."

The first because that weird guy with the "hitler was right" sign didn't just appear on our main street corner randomly. He was probably tiggered by some of the hateful rhetoric about our first Pride parade. The second because he was escorted off the street by Trevanion who later posted a Tiktoc explaining the tolerance paradox. Nazis are definitely outside of our tolerance limit.

The hate speech is still being documented on the anonymous website because it is still being tolerated on the Taxpayers FB group. Before they kicked all the people out of the group there was some actual civil dialogue going on, with EDC folks explaining how the TIF event funding works and others refuting various misconceptions. That was constructive. Now with no one to disagree with them, it is just a boring echo chamber of grievance.

I am critical of negativity online, but I'm generally bullish on town. Unity is a great little town and is moving ahead in a good direction. Town government is open to new ideas and welcoming to newcomers. There are a number of economic development projects in the works. It's a good place to live.

Marker: the entertainment value of Indictment Week.

Things that happened today: At the library, Abdi Nor Iftin did a reading and chat in the community center big room. In the children's room, Melissa read And Tango Makes Three for Story Time. Unity had its first ever Pride parade and BBQ at Triplet Park. All this in the rain and 45 degrees after a 90 degree day yesterday. You probably should always have your first Pride parade in a cold rain; it just shows that you are unstoppable. It feels historic to me, a marker of change in our town. The hardware store owner was on the grill; young people came out in numbers you don't see at other events; it felt wonderful. Colleen Maguire is the lead organizer of Diversity in Unity (a name I suggested as a joke; it's how Melissa & I used to refer to ourselves) and she got all the details right. Steve Czarny is a fearless Canadian who lives in town and tolerates no bullshit online. Someone grabbed the nasty comments from the FB group "Taxpayers of Unity Maine" and posted them to a website called Unity Doesn't Hate. Keeps people from later denying what they said. Posters tie themselves in illogical knots; one noted that two crosswalks were painted differently and that makes the crosswalk void and now people do not have to stop for pedestrians. Anything except saying what they are really opposed to. It is now a badge of honor to have been kicked off of the Taxpayers group. Those who didn't get kicked off are forwarding screen shots to the website. It's kind of a new day in Unity, Maine.

In library world, our 8x12 shed finally got delivered (Espo suggests that we call it the Beer Garden), Brian G moved some granite around, MFT emailed me back and suggested a meeting in July about the Hub-as-coworking-space idea, and we had a reading in the community center room. It's always thrilling when an author steps out of a book into real life. His story reminded me of The Monk of Mokha with its everpresent danger and its power of family network.