A Long Hard Slog

I've just about given up watching television news. Not because I already know everything, and everything better, but because I'm starting to fear I already know too much. Our national news coverage in the medium of your choice is pretty much 'the parting on the left is now parting on the right and the beards have all grown longer overnight.'

Two and a half years ago some of us elected someone to be the Disrupter in Chief and he has been all of that and more. Not sure why so many of us, myself included, are stunned and saddened to almost sullen silence at the depth of his venality and ineptitude. 

Those who voted for him didn't want politics as usual, and he delivered that by the truckload. I cannot pretend to be unhappily surprised or shocked at the things he says (which are all almost always lies) or does (which seem so often to be deliberately callous, hateful, and hurtful). That's the great thing about being a pessimist; I can only be surprised and never disappointed. and yet with this guy...  

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, which now so often appears to be the Great Divide in terms of distance from one position to the other, we have a lot of faux flustered outrage and little else in terms of offering an alternative path and alternate vision of who we are as a nation. 

We pick a cable news network or newspaper that confirms our biases as truths and creates a safe space bubble that allows us to comfortably demonize everyone who doesn't watch/read it, and/or who disagrees with us. And all the while, America drinks and goes home.

And at the end of the day, all of us look around to see where the next scandal is starting to form. The odor of ill repute is so intoxicating and the joy at the misfortune of others can be so addictive. Circuses are what's called for in these serious times to distract us from ever thinking about our dire circumstances and if the collateral damage proves to be someone famous or infamous, what of it? 

"When you should have found someone to put the blame on, Though the fury's hot and hard; I still see that cold graveyard. There's a solitary stone that's got your name on."         
-bill kenny