Despite the pandemic, June came strutting in like a drum major with a purple lilac for the pom-pom atop its shako. Behind the drum major, puddles of sunlight flashed like a brass band in the spring rain left behind by the month of May. Breezes cavorted and scoured in the wake of the parade as if to sanitize, sanitize, sanitize as decreed across the land. And the band played on…

I think the song was that one by Perez Prado that goes, “It’s cherry pink and apple blossom white/when your true love comes your way…” Them’s the marching orders, yes indeed, the theme of June with all its weddings and an anthem of silent vows in would-be hearts. Embrace your brides, husbands one and all. Cling to your grooms, married maidens. Matters not if they are there in the flesh, there is a place for your hopeful heart whatever your dreams, memories or masks. This is love in the time of Coronavirus.

The perfect combination of romance and passion is everyone’s holy grail, yet fully half of all the correspondence I get about relationships laments that one or both are missing. Battered and beleaguered by kids, stresses and boredom, couples are living (or is it dying) like zombies. But hey, that’s what Spring is for. Sex may be the object of gender bonding, but romance is how you get there. Didn’t you get the memo? Tweet-tweet, buzz-buzz. Romance & passion. Got to get the order right. True, it starts with sexual attraction – we don’t fall in love with mailboxes and fire hydrants – but you don’t leap into the bushes without saying hello or shaking hands first. See, once we run around the bases a few times, all we want is home runs. But you started off as singles singling, so treat each other like that – with that kind of respect for prerogatives. If physical intimacy is the centerpiece of long-term bonding, the blinding ecstasy of lightning is just short-term maintenance. Passion works best with Prelude. And rainbows happen after the moisture of life is delivered. So, hearken to the music of Spring. The pure emotional joy of romance is everywhere in life and in communication these days. June is bustin’ out all over!

Sullygrams unavoidably come out too late for Memorial Day and too early for the 4^th of July, but I wish to pay tribute to all Americans, living or dead, who came together as a civil society under the rule of law to celebrate our freedoms. So, I’ve adapted something I posted on Facebook for Memorial Day that celebrates our democracy and the unique design of that freedom:

The price of liberty is blood. Not my blood. Not directly. Though I joined ROTC, it was not to be and I did not pay it. Nor have any of you among the quick paid the price of the dead either, though certainly some of you live with devastating injuries from military serice. I put out my flag this morning, gave it a silent prayer and a salute. Such a small acknowledgment for all that I owe to the vigilance and sacrifice of others over decades from even before I was born. And so easily lost. Frustrating, then, to live in times such as these when the great majority of guarantors of our freedom and security are so little thought of and even dismissed with scorn.

I believe that is the worst of injuries – to forget and to scorn. Premier Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, who saw us as weakening and devitalized, famously predicted we would fall from within, and that is what he meant. So, today I celebrate our strength and the covenant with the dead who paid the ultimate price for it. It is so quickly lost, given away in fact. We saw the Russians slip into Crimea to annex them unopposed in 2014 and just today the fresh Chinese usurpation of Hong Kong into the communist/socialist rule is being consolidated by force. There have been many socialist experiments on our soil, though they are little mentioned because all have failed.

The first Plymouth colony under Gov. Bradford of Massachusetts tried communism for a couple of years but near starvation and lack of incentive drove them to abandon it for free enterprise. Communes and sects have risen and fallen throughout our history, including the well-known Brook Farm experiment in socialism (which was endorsed by my ancestor Nathaniel Hawthorne until he became disillusioned). Digressions in freedom are always paid for in blood…except when they are secured by freedom itself – the right to peacefully oppose that which secures opposers that right, as with pacifists and conscientious objectors – whose price is what we honor today. Millions of soldiers who never got to finish their lives secured those freedoms.

A woman once said that there was no difference between communism and socialism except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: “…communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by vote; it is merely the difference between murder and suicide” – Ayn Rand. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, I hope you recognize the breadth and scope of that word “freedom” and what it has cost, paid in advance, and how absurdly simple it is to throw away, never to be regained from the more repressive systems that replace it, ill thought out. The first obligation of governance is to protect its people, so that they can rule themselves. My salute, America…

Was going to end this Sullygram here, but that was before Minneapolis became Ground Zero for the worst and best of human behavior. If it can be said that there is a silver lining to the George Floyd outrage, perhaps it is that the positive outpouring of all races was starkly distinct from the negative behavior of criminal looters, violent haters, anarchists, arsonists and opportunists. Here’s how I put it in a Facebook post on the second night of the Minneapolis riots:

Please, please, if you truly want racism to end, and you decry the outrageous abuse of George Floyd as a symbol of it, or even if you think it was a cynical cop’s attitude toward all suspects, recognize that the vast majority of Americans are on board with horror and disgust over this man’s persecution. But also understand that if you overdo it – if you try to parlay it into an affirmation of every hard Leftist’s agenda based on hating law enforcement and celebrating victimhood – you will lose that moral high ground. Reasoning people will discredit you or see you at best as well-intentioned but self-righteous and at worst as irrational criminal anarchists.

Social media is being bombarded with embittered politics trying to rekindle one-sided narratives and recoup perceived losses. There is much more to be gained in terms of color-blind justice if the near universal condemnation of this tragic event is seized upon as an opportunity to strike a balance between fair-minded people and those with a “never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste” mentality. Those who push hate-America politics to the limit will be lumped with the race-baiters, the young and dumb, the sanctimonious and the lawless. Already those looters who stole liquor and consumer goods have poisoned perceptions for a generation. Those who started fires, broke windows and spray-painted obscenities and crude pictures have made it easy for real racists to adopt their own self-righteous intransigence. That’s the long-term tragedy. One would expect extremes in these circumstances, but extremes are nonetheless mindless and counterproductive. The nation can grow from this, but only by tempering its polarized emotional filters. Load this tragedy up like a Christmas tree and it will blow the circuit. Darkness will descend again and all camps will nod knowingly, confirmed in their biases and knee-jerk reflexes.

This month’s dozen photos below are all about kayaking early and late in my slice of paradise. Some treasures are for the heart, some for the mind, and some – like #12 – are for keeping those disgusting Charmin bears gainfully employed…

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan