"It's difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." -- Voltaire

 I took this photo today in downtown Fort Worth, where I was born in 1954 -- literally downtown about eight blocks from this spot on Main Street. The photo looks north, across the Sundance Square nightlife area to the Tarrant County Courthouse built in 1893. The cost was $409,000 -- an expense considered so extravagant at the time that voters threw out the entire county government the following year. I know the feeling.

I haven't written in this blog in nearly three months and that's been by design. I knew it would take awhile for us to reintegrate into the US. The two months in Canada was a help, as was our two months in Nashville. We're temporarily in a downtown Fort Worth apartment until returning to the house in mid-January. That will be another period of serious readjustment -- putting furniture and fixtures back to rights, placing kitchen equipment in its right spot and so forth. None of this will be done in a hurry. Hell -- just getting acclimated to driving a car everywhere is adjustment enough. I miss the daily walking as part of just living life. The US simply doesn't get it. Plus a lot of other things.

One of our first challenges on return to the US was a confrontation with the healthcare system joke. The US has wonderful professionals in its clinics and hospitals, but the artificial administration of insurance and its coverage is a needless embarrassment on the world stage. The first test of my updated Medicare Advantage plan was a dismal failure, as the company refused to pay anything because I was out of network. Sorry about that dudes but my suspected spot of skin cancer turned out to be real. I got stuck with a bill for $800. Normally I'd just chalk it up to bad luck but what really pissed me off was the dermatologist's office offered to cut my bill in half if I paid it on the spot. This puts my health care in the same category as negotiating the price of a used car. They'll get their damn money. Very, very slowly. In the meantime, thanks for reinforcing what matters most. Jerks.

These are the kinds of things we're having to relearn after some 15 months in, frankly, better places than the US. Economic realities will keep us here for the time being but it's made more difficult by experiencing and knowing there are so many better ways of doing things. The main problem is our health insurance system and our gun culture and our election system and so much else about the "land of the free" is a self-imposed prison too many refuse to recognize as such. They think we're the best place on Earth. We're not.

This is what happens when someplace has a population more familiar with Harry Potter than its own Constitution or The Federalist Papers. It's particularly true in the South and here in Texas. The various legislatures are intent on dragging us back to 1948 despite what a majority of citizens want. Our Supreme Court is on the take and one of our two major political parties is held hostage by an indicted marginally functional wannabe autocrat propped up by fawning acolytes with no regard for our history or even its legal system. All in all, our return to the US has left us resigned to this national stupidity run largely by a shrinking minority of old white men and a few easily duped women -- my congressional representative among them.

All that said, it has been good to be back with family and to get to know two grandchildren -- one born while we were gone and another I hadn't seen in far too long. Our Thanksgiving was also a chance to meet my son-in-law's mom and her husband plus some others. We had also missed my daughter's wedding while away, so it's good to begin reassembly of all that. But it'll take time to get used to a lot as we move through the end of the year and into the next.

As frustrated as I get with Texas and the US in general, I dearly love my native Fort Worth and the surrounding Cross Timbers region. I can say the same about Dallas and its Blackland dirt, since I was raised there. Both are blue spots (well, kinda purple in Tarrant County) in a vast, disappointing sea of red. We know the places to go if we feel forced to make a move. All we can do in the short term is make sure we're ready for whatever might come next. 

"...I will not go quietly. I will not lie down...." -- Don Henley