Yet another weekend in which I did nearly nothing -- caught up on laundry and dishes, cooked a meal on the grill. I tell myself I'm tired; I tell myself the increasing arthritis in my knees and hands is reason enough to vegetate until warmer and less windy weather comes along.
There's truth in that, but it is increasingly obvious to me that the larger issue is burnout. After five years or a decade of history that feels more and more like being strapped into a deranged roller coaster with my eyelids held open, I'm all screamed out. I'm overloaded by horror. Terror attacks, a pandemic that shattered my faith in the good sense of the average citizen, politics that took the ruins of that faith and plowed it under with radioactive salt, bombs and missiles raining down on a modern, civilized country and more terror spurring an even worse response: it's overwhelming.
I don't know what our planet's variegated crop of neo-barbarians will break next. I do know it will be precious and probably irreplaceable.
Both my wife and her brother refuse to be informed about politics. Was it so for Germans in the '30s?
ReplyDeleteThere is only one thing that may be broken that is precious and irreplaceable. That is the idea that it is unacceptable to do wrong things to others in order to further the goals of "our side".
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