Is he Praying? Trying to remember which platform he was watching the latest Episodic Series on? Thinking about “The Big Beautiful Bill? Wondering what is coming next?
- Yogi Berra said it a while back, “It is hard to make predictions – especially about the future”. And as Mickey Newbury sang, “The future is not what it used to be.”…I’ll go one better: “The Present is not what it used to be.”…and while I’m at it “The Past is not what it was.” (However, the Past is going to read a lot better if the current ‘Winners’ get to edit it the way they want it to have been – back before it stopped being Great.)
- My awareness has not yet been dulled into indifference. I am still capable of being shocked by daily events: Threats of 200% tariffs here & there, our supporting Russian aggression…Oh, and officially Eliminating & Banning ordinary words from the Government parlance (i.e.,: Disability, Diversity, Exclusion, Equity, Female, Gender, Hate speech, Antiracist, Biases, Cultural relevance, Minority, Women, Victims… 200 awful words like those. I feel like I have been psychologically induced into a mental Gitmo and can’t get out. When I wake in the morning I stagger to my i-phone and am greeted by the news of European Tourists being “mistakingly” arrested in the States…several confined in solitary for days…The President saying he did not know some of the Jan 6’ers were violent; but there “…are murderers walking around on the streets everyday anyway”…That Russia won’t give up what it wants in Ukraine…that the price of eggs is going up and we should raise chickens in our back yard…and I don’t have a back yard…I don’t want to buy anything from Bezos’s Amazon; but I can’t figure out how to buy anything anyway else… and Fox has control of the Defense Department, and the Kennedy Center …and Hannity claims he can say whatever he wants to on TV because he is in the entertainment business…and I can’t turn the news off because if I do I won’t know if Canada is going to invade or if there will be no more avocados, or anything at Walmart because the Chinese are going to screw us price-wise, or if we don’t get those minerals from Greenland, our enemies will…and are we ever going to get more wine from France or Italy? And OMG it is hard to get away from it all, even though I can’t do anything about it…you say call your congresspersons and I say they don’t answer the phone…and I’m told they don’t read their emails either…and if you stick your face out of the crowd or get on TV or on “Social Media” and protest, you might get death threats, or worse your family members get death threats and maybe you should stay silent…But wait! Consider the Fire-Ants: When they want to cross a river they get themselves together and they form a raft made of themselves and the ant-raft floats across the river and they are on the other side…but I wonder what happens to the ants on the bottom of the raft…where was I? …Oh yes …I was lost in these Extraordinary times, or Appalling times…or whichever time zone you think you are in, depending upon where you stand, or sit or think, or not think…
Goodbye & Good Luck and “Hello” to Ellen & Patrick, wherever you are
