Hiking on the Appalachian Trail and others – The decline of religion in the U.S. – Yet another Trump con game – Evening statistics
I went with the Vigorous Hikers today on the Appalachian Trail from Rte. 522, going over Compton Peak (but not stopping for the detour to the basalt columns, regrettably) to the Jenkins Gap trail, taking the latter to various roads and eventually to the Land’s Run Trail, up Land’s Run to Dickey Ridge, and up Dickey Ridge to the AT via the Springhouse Trail: about 19 miles and 4200 feet of elevation gain. The weather was clear, and very warm by the middle of the day. In fact I could have wished it a few degrees cooler. That last climb from the stream to return to the parking area at Rte. 522 is only about 400-500 feet, but it felt like much more while scaling it in the midst of 80-degree heat. There was not a great variety of wildflowers, but the trail featured a large amount of bloodroot. I don’t remember seeing them in such profusion anywhere else. I met GP and BH on the last part of the hike. They questioned me curiously about the plans of the Capital Hiking Club; in particular, I confirmed that the club indeed plans to resume hikes in August, though possibly with buses at greatly reduced capacity. The Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC), as they tell me, does not plan to resume hikes in the foreseeable future; we will have to wait until 2022 at the earliest before they will begin to consider organizing hikes again.
Religion is on the decline in the U.S. Just 47% of the population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to a survey by Gallup, down from 70% two decades ago. Part of the reason is that the younger generations, starting with the millennials, are turning away from religion generally; but also the extreme right-wing politics that many of the mega-churches has alienated many of its followers.
Perhaps, after all, religion is in a state of transition in this country and elsewhere. God, says Don Benedetto, the saintly old priest in Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, “does not attach very much importance to His name; on the contrary, at the very beginning of His Commandants, He ordained that His name should not be taken in vain. Might not the ideal of social justice that animates the masses today be one of the pseudonyms the Lord is using to free Himself from the control of the churches and the banks?”
It is related that when Robert Browning’s narrative poem “Sordello” was published, Alfred Tennyson tried to get through it, without success. “There were only two lines in it that I understood,” he reported, “and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told!'”
I was reminded of this episode when Donald Trump responded to the allegation that he defrauded campaign donors by including an easily overlooked pre-checked box on the donation page, which most donors did not see, that turned a single donation into a monthly contribution. As Election Day drew closer, the pre-checked box created weekly contributions. The campaign has since been forced to refund $122 million to the donors (without interest, however – which means that he essentially has received an interest-free loan for this amount). Today Trump published a disclaimer consisting of two sentences, and they were both lies: “In fact, many people were so enthusiastic that they gave over and over, and in certain cases where they would give too much, we would promptly refund their contributions. Our overall dispute rate was less than 1% of total online donations, a very low number.” The people who “gave over and over” did not do so voluntarily and the dispute extended to hundreds of thousands of transactions, amounting to nearly 11% of the total contributions. Some of the donors have actually gone on record to protest – but only against WinRed, the fund-raising platform built for the GOP, and never against Trump himself. What does it take to make people realize that this man is nothing but a common swindler?
Today’s statistics as of 9:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 133,006,775; # of deaths worldwide: 2,885,207; # of cases U.S.: 31,559,735; # of deaths; U.S.: 570,247. Today the total number of deaths nationwide was just over 7.5% of the global total, a far less disproportionate figure than in earlier months. I am sorry to see that the published statistics for Mexico have not been updated even after its own government has stated that these are under-reported by half as much as the official totals. This may be true of other nations as well.