What Holds Us Together: Stories of Love, Loss, and Standing Up.

In When the Tides Held the Moon, by Venessa Vida Kelley, Río lies with his head against driftwood. Two months of Brooklyn’s tap appears to be too much for a merman’s power of purification. Benny whispers to his amor to see if he is awake.

 In Tom Sawyer Abroad, by Mark Twain, Tom says the professor is so quiet that he must be asleep, and pauses when he says they better. Huck asks, “Better what?” Tom replies that they better slip back to the professor, tie him up, and land the ship.

In service on November 30, during joys and sorrows, I realized that day was the 3 year anniversary of the death of Dannilyn. I guess she has been so busy gallivanting the universe to bother having her apparition visit me. I held the stone close, told her in my thoughts I missed her, and dropped the stone in the water with a mild tearing up. Maybe someday when she decides to check back in, I’ll consider doing something memorative, like cooking a special meal. It’s just so wasteful to do something like that when I live alone.

I was talking to a friend after service, and discussed the strange sense that came over me on Wednesday night. Right as I was about to stand up, I suddenly felt really winded with a light buzz and I didn’t know how long it was going to take, or if it was over for me. As we proceeded outside, I took a seat where I could hopefully recover, and I did eventually. It was scary. It reminded me of when Danilynn suddenly couldn’t breathe three years ago.

During that conversation, it suddenly dawned on me that I had eaten several large double chocolate chip cookies that I had supplied during our gaming session. I thought to myself, could I have given myself a sugar rush, and with it an elevated heart rate. When I realized this and said it to my friend, he said that can happen. Now I know better. Moderation in all thing is a pretty wise saying.

According to Nathan Crick in The Rhetoric of Facscism, Daniel Bell’s Cold War rhetoric specifically deflects reality. The person who thinks “America” is on the “right road” becomes an apologist for elite-dominated imperialism, even though they are outwardly liberal. Bell’s dependence on rhetorical tricks is revealed by rhetorical analysis to show a “hidden fascistic underbelly of his Obfuscation of the U. S. Empire.”

In This Tender Lander, by William Kent Krueger, Albert asks Odie where he was. Odie responds that Faria and DiMarco are dead, and Albert asks how it happened.

Jack drinks his liquor between numbers and suggests that they play “Red River Valley.” Odie asks if he’s sure he wants to do that.

We interact with artificial intelligence when we search for an apartment online, apply for a loan, go through airport security, or look up a question on a search engine. The ACLU is strongly urging Congress to pass the AI Civil Rights Act of 2025. Within the act are interlocking protections targeting discrimination, testing protocols, and notice requirements in sectors where people have experienced erosion of their civil rights by AI systems. According to the ACLU, “disparate impact claims can be onerous to bring forward.” Filing of AI-related discrimination claims is made more difficult by the continual weakening of disparate impact protection.

Jury service should be considered a duty just as important as voting. Juries are designed to be a check against governmental overreach. The two types of juries are grand juries and trial juries. The primary responsibilities of a juror are to 1) determine if the government met its burden of proof, and 2) render a verdict.

A coalition of human rights organizations, trade unions, and fan groups are calling for FIFA, the international soccer governing body, to match its lofty rhetoric on rights with concrete action. According to Andrea Florence, the executive director of Sport & Rights Alliance, “The 2026 World Cup is the first to begin with human rights criteria embedded in the bidding process. But the deteriorating human rights situation in the United States has put those commitments at risk.” Minky Worden, who oversees sport for Human Rights Watch stated, “FIFA’s so-called peace prize is being awarded against a backdrop of violent detentions of immigrants, national guard deployments in US Cities, and the obsequious cancellation of FIFA’s own anti-racism and anti-discrimination campaigns.”

In Working Backwards, Colin Bryar and Bill Car advise readers to not be afraid to tweak parts of a process to address specific issues. The motivation for a team at Amazon to start conducting two phone screens for candidates was correct, because they realized they had a problem with their hiring process. In another case, a team decided to automatically phone screen female candidates, and discovered as a result that there was a gender bias when initially screening applicants. Everyone was still required to pass the phone screen and that simple change allowed the team to have a more diversified pool of qualified members.

In the book In the Lives of Puppets, by T. J. Klune, what is broken can someday be repaired. Vic folds his shirt and sets it on a small dresser. Pulling a metal box out of the corner under his bed, he sits back up.

At the edge of the forest, the team is in luck. Vic tells Nurse Ratched to focus on grid location 3B. They have never gotten that far.

Nurse Ratched asks him if he has lost his mind. Rambo wonders if they will get lost. Hap scowls.

Friday evening I encountered petition gatherers at the local grocery store. When I asked if they were taking signatures for the redistricting issue, they said they were. I told them loud enough for other people to hear that I was declining to sign, that these petitions were an effort to take away the vote of the people who had already voted for fair elections. The first person tried to pass me a piece of paper, saying it would help him out. I continued to decline. I told him that this was about a single party trying to roll back what the people voted for. He admitted to me that they weren’t going to get the signatures they needed.

In the store, I encountered a 70 year-old-woman who was so fed up with what the Republicans were trying to do. She told me that she comes to the grocery store because she can’t talk about these issues with her daughter.

On the way back out of the store, I encountered a different individual trying to get people to sign the same petition. When I spoke with him, he asked, “Don’t the people get to decide?” I told him that they already did, that what was really going on was that one party wanted to shut another party completely out of the decision making process—that they couldn’t stand to have a dissenting voice. The answer I got was, “You’re right. You’re right.”

On my way back to my car, I saw another person heading to store carrying a clipboard that looked like it had a petition on it. I thought to myself, My God, these people are doing this in shifts. There is a large single donor that is pouring money into this effort to eliminate fair districting. The people running the petition have no understanding or knowledge of the history. All they know is get as many people to sign as they can.

Meanwhile, the Utah legislature called a special session to repeal HB267 and to try to force the Utah Supreme Court to give in. Better Boundaries held a protest gathering at the Capitol to demonstrate that the people are watching.

On Saturday, after whipping up a batch of white chocolate oatmeal cookies, I went online for a bylaw review meeting for the Utah Stonewall Dems. We looked at some draft language and talked about the issues we want to address. They include: 1) stronger gatekeeping for our endorsement process, 2) stronger commitments for board members, and 3) creating new roles and standing committees. I feel very hopeful about the process.

After the bylaw meeting, I attended the Women’s Democratic Club Luncheon, where we had presentations by The Other Side Academy and Village, and Journey of Hope Utah. The Other Side Academy had compelling stories from a couple of people who have been through the program. The model they have used is to use community therapy and work discipline to help break the cycle of recidivism and chronic hopelessness. The programs are purely voluntary and consensual. They show a 70-80% success rate of helping people break their dependencies and avoid reincarceration. The village is still in its formative years, with about 80% of the first group passing through the orientation process.

The Utah legislature wants to inistitutionalize the chronically homeless. Unless the program is 100% voluntary and consensual it will be a form of cruel and unusual punishment. In addition, any individual that joins needs to be able to check themselves out, or it will be no better than the institutions we left behind a hundred years ago.

The offer of housing is just a form of icing on the cake. In reality, businesses want the homeless people elsewhere so as not to detract from their profits. Those in power do not want people to see the effects that their policies are having and would rather those people be out of sight and out of mind.

Shannon Miller-Cox presented Journey of Hope Utah, an organization that is dedicated to ending the intergenerational cycles of domestic abuse, and human and occupational trafficking for women and LGBTQ+ individuals. As a former police officer, she works to help engage others in trauma-informed methods of therapy. Much of the work involves getting people to safe spaces and critical counseling.

While the luncheon was going on, I also attended the HD41 special election virtually. John Arthur was elected with amazing support to be the next legislator to represent House District 41, and was sworn in just in time for the special session this week, repacing Gay Lynn Bennion, who is to be sworn in as the new mayor of Cottonwood Heights.

Following the luncheon, I took a dozen cookies to be auctioned off at the Salt Lake County Democratic Party Holiday Party. It was an amazing turnout. If you wanted one place to talk to several congressional candidates, this was the place. It was great to see them and know that I stand a decent chance of being represented by someone I consider a friend in congress.

Sunday we had an interesting discussion on the power of love. Many people over centuries or millenia have come to the conclusion that God is Love. It is a powerful message, the belief in sovereign power or influence that cares for our well-being. It blends well with an earthly-based well-being where we are a part of the earth itself and not simply owners-to-be of the land. If the earth is seen that wonderful living organism that it is, how can we not fail to love that which loves us back when we take such care of it. We are the earth, we’re its ears, its heart, its voice. It behooves us to feel it more deeply within each of us.

Taking this one step further, we can proclaim Love is God. When we read love as an action as well as state of being and intent, it proclaims that dynamic power that caring can have. It proclaims that positive action yields positive, trasformative effects. How many times, when someone has been moved by an act of compassion in their deepest despair that they see the mover as an angel, a messenger of God. When people come together to serve, to help, and to make space for healing, they are then truly bringing something divine into someone’s life. For me, it goes just a bit farther: Compassion is God. Is this not the ultimate true calling? Deep in our hearts and minds, we feel called to show compassion for one another, to be there for them, to comfort them when they are hurting, to seek to reduce or eliminate suffering. It is recognizing when someone is truly suffering, not taking advantage of that, and showing them mercy. It is accepting someone for who they are and who they need to be. It’s feeling joyful for another when they feel love for someone else or for themselves.

Compassion, means “with feeling,” in particular a feeling that is a strong desire to do something for someone or something else. It means also recognizing that we are bonded together, that my actions and words affect you and yours affect me. It is a recognition that the harmonic energy of our words and actions ripple from being to being and back. We can make the world more livable by truly living in it—with compassion.

In What Girls Are Made Of, by Elana K. Arnold, most of Nina’s classes are AP. When Seth’s car isn’t in the lot in the morning, she can’t release her breath until she sees him in class. She feels as if she is a chameleon, a scuttlefish, or an octopus around him.

The day of Applonia’s party, it’s a relief for Nina to have something to do. Despite the five-year drought, the ocean still has plenty of water in it. When it does rain, she finds herself taking deep gulps of air, breathing in the smell of life.

Yesterday I received one of two WWExie awards during the Technical Town Hall at my company. The awards are given to people recognized as technical experts, and announced by the CTO at our quarterly town halls. I have yet to see the write-up for the award and may never actually see it.

The award came as a bit of a surprise. I was working on testing and debugging new functionality before I started my year-end break today. I was hoping to jump onto the town hall if I was able to make significant progress, even though my boss told me that he needed me working on the verifation as much as possible. He later retracted his request to skip the meeting, and I responded with my thumbs up. Then he later texted if I received the message, to which I replied “yes.”

Meanwhile, I was deep in debugging with another coworker when I started receiving a lot of congratulatory messages. Some people started posting something about “winning the award.” I asked one of my coworkers what I won. And he said “the WWEXie.” When I told him why I wasn’t there, he remarked, “like I said, ‘diligent’.” I immediately let the coworker I was debugging with know that I was dropping to attend the Tech town hall. They were discussing the AI initiative, and I stayed on until they got to the trivia section. When my boss joined us, he said that knew that I was nominated and was trying to figure out if I was going to win the award. He said he was going to feel really bad for telling me to skip the meeting if I had won.

It’s all well and good. In my time remaining yesterday, I was able to help my coworker get to the point where he could continue testing today since I was going to be out, and we showed my supervisor where the logic was that he needed to change. Today begins my break for the holidays. I report back on December 26 for mostly an on-call day. The gamemaster had to cancel our game for today, and it looks like we won’t be meeting again until the 29th. My next scheduled social gathering is on the 21st for the Utah Stonewall Dems Holiday Party. Going twelve days without a social connection seems like its going to feel long. I drove by the Legendarium to just spend some time there, but sadly failed to find a parking spot close enough due to the road construction.

Instead, I took advantage of the soothing motion of the drive to stop by Jack-In-The-Box for a sourdough sandwich on my journey back home.

In all these moments—whether holding a stone for someone we loved, resisting those who would take power from the people, celebrating unexpected recognition, or simply remembering to take care of our own fragile bodies—one truth rises like the tide: we are connected, and our compassion is our strength. Love, in its active and courageous form, calls us to stand witness, to nurture, to defend, to repair what is broken, and to imagine what is possible. As we step into the days ahead, may we choose to live that compassion boldly: to speak up when justice falters, to hold space for those who are hurting, to organize our communities with care, and to remember that every small, intentional act of love reshapes the world around us. Let us be the voice, the hands, the heart of a more humane future—together, and starting now.