It wasn't the pandemic that broke me. It was the way people went crazy during the pandemic. The already-crazy ones got crazier, and they have dragged a whole lot of other people along with them. The crazy started out political and has become even more so.
2024 election-year politics keeps turning the crazy up higher and I don't know if I can stand it. There's no path back; either I have to hug every drag queen I see, or I have to be petitioning my legislators to outlaw 'em forthwith, and to tell you the truth, I never thought about 'em much one way or another before and I resent having to now. And it's like that these days with every kind of eccentric person there is, from sign-waving hermits to the annoying dude who shows up at every City Council meeting, wanting to make sure none of the city's money has been invested in Raytheon or Israel, DEI or Remington, space aliens or illegal aliens: somehow I have to have an opinion about each of them, and I have to press the government to Do Something, instead of the government sitting down and shutting up unless there's force, fraud or infringements of the Bill of Rights.
Candidates predict chaos, or tell me it's already raging (often in places where it obviously is not), and that only they can wield the strong and unyielding force that will crush it.
Gotta tell ya, I'm not into a government that goes a-crushing. The best and most effective things I have seen governments do in recent years -- and that includes big-city police forces -- happened when they did a lot of listening and a little talking; when they handed out bottles of water instead of a spritz of OC and when they used persuasion instead of force. When they asked rather than commanded.
I'm sick and tired of lies and hate and trying to hammer Americans into a uniform 1950s TV-sitcom mold that we never really fit. C'mon, look again: Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke's television personas lived in worlds with plenty of non-conforming loons, of unexpected crooks and high-achievers alongside the workaday scufflers and strivers, and the stories were the better for it. We watched those shows and we saw our neighbors, our families -- ourselves.
Your neighbors are black, white, asian, gay, straight, flamboyant or subdued. They're skinny and fat. They're loud, quiet, rappers and rockers and professors and professional sports fans. They're liberal and conservative and politically apathetic. They're not, in staggering majority, Existential Evil: over 99.9% of the people you meet every day are harmless, one way or another.
And dammit, you ought to be treating them better. You ought to be expecting your politicians to treat them better. You shouldn't be howling for blood and it screws me up so badly that so many of you are that I have trouble gathering the courage to step outside my house.
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3 comments:
You'd think that staying that mad all the time would be exhausting, but apparently some people are really into it.
I just sent in my ballot for the local city election: I get to vote for mayor and one commissioner. The campaign mailers talk about traffic jams on Pines Blvd and keeping out the garbage incinerator the county wants to build in city limits, and some stuff about taxes. But nobody mentioned drag queens or book bans or DEI or migrants or anything else.
So it is possible to be reasonable even now.
Jeffrey Smith
The historical inevitable for those who howl for the blood of their fellow citizens is often to be the first up against the wall after their guy wins. As Solzhenitsyn noted, they put him in office, so they could do it again- why risk it?
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