It’s a sad and pathetic situation. The Republicans seem to be digging themselves a hole by keeping their hats in the Trump ring. Donald Trump appears only to be proving to anyone who hasn’t already noticed that he is the least qualified person in a long time to run for President.

The man obviously has some sort of inner fire burning, but many know it’s fueled by rage and vengeance. And fear. One might dare think that he could yet flame out before our eyes.

He doesn’t want the job because he cares about the country and the people who live in it. He wants the job because he sees it as his ticket to staying ahead of the jailer. Sadly, he’s somehow gotten this far, maintained some sort of undeserved “relevance,” so we have to keep dealing with him and the cast of misfits around him.

It’s somehow unsatisfying and infuriating to think that we’re once again faced with a choice of voting for Trump or someone whose main attribute is that they’re not Trump—as joyous and hopeful as the Harris ticket might seem. I hope Kamala and Tim can put their own stamp on this election, put some daylight between them and whatever it was that people found unappealing about Joe Biden. I hope they can survive the assault that’s coming from the Trump camp and Putin and Xi and Iran and whoever else is rooting for and working toward America’s implosion.

I hope that, someday, someone can summarize and record just how awful Trump was, how much damage he has wrought, how much doubt and poison he introduced, how much time he has forced us to waste. And I hope this same person, or persons, can happily write that, ultimately, even he and the whack jobs and billionaires who propped him up couldn’t prevail.

I hope that’s the ending to this current chapter.

A couple things… why the hell wasn’t Tim Walz’s military service more thoroughly vetted; and what’s left to consider regarding Trump’s fitness for office—any office, never mind POTUS?

Regarding Walz’s military service, why leave an opening for Republicans to pounce on? Yes, Walz served four years beyond the twenty required to receive full retirement benefits. But apparently overlooked or left out was the detail that he retired before his unit was due to deploy to Iraq.

Maybe he should have been more forthcoming in mentioning this instead of leaving it to the opposition to uncover and pick away at and turn into an issue of faux patriotism or cowardice on Walz’s part.

Walz had every right to retire, with honor and regardless of the timing, but he probably didn’t foresee that he’d be running for high office one day and his detractors would turn over every stone when it came to finding something to use as a black mark on his character.

Secondly, what more do we need to know about Donald Trump and his fitness for office? His go-to tactics are all grade school playground stuff, and he’s obviously got a fetish for crowd sizes.

Pronouncing Harris’s name wrong, on purpose; assigning her nicknames, at all—regardless of whether or not they’re ridiculous and unimaginative; his penchant for race-baiting; his vacuous wandering off topic at his sleazy and tedious rallies; his association with and respect for far-right conservative fascist wannabes and actual autocrats and dictators; his feeble efforts at distancing himself from Project 2025; his default mode of lying through his teeth; his 34 felony convictions, and criminal intent in multiple jurisdictions; his instigation of an insurrection; his heinous mishandling of a pandemic; his disregard for American history and institutions; his blatant ignorance, incompetence and coldness in any facet of governance, diplomacy, thoughtful service, or human interaction; his gargantuan ego; his stunning immaturity and lack of character; his age.

The list is partial.

What are we doing? Why is Donald Trump still in the news? We’re just feeding his need for attention, which should tell us all we need to know about his fitness for office. And then there’s the rest of the stuff.

Since when is “progressive” a pejorative term? Why is that? What’s wrong with being OK with, say, moving from fossil fuels to wind or solar energy, or opening a path for people to vote, or funding meal programs at schools, or making it possible for many more people to acquire health insurance, or following through on payments from Social Security that were, in the first place, paid into with the expectation of receiving financial sustenance once retired?

What’s so bad and scary about differing sexual identities, or simply caring for people who need a helping hand for a bit? Is “regressive” the logical opposite, the way to go? Backwards movement and neglect—is this the golden ring that we should be reaching for?

The height of irony, one could argue, is that those who critique progressive policy are often the vociferous “Christians” among us who apparently have a different understanding of what love is.

We should all be tired of being labeled. But I suppose if we downplayed certain words, we’d just come up with different ones.

Change is hard.

I’m never sure if the anger at a protest is real or just crowd energy, mob mentality, people playing mad but really only jumping on a bandwagon as an excuse to do something different with their day.

I’m sure there is a nucleus of anger, that it starts with a few people feeling compelled to protest and voice concerns. But often enough it seems to deteriorate into something less focused and reasonable, ending up as just another excuse to break things and get angry about any number of other grievances, both real and imagined.

Maybe Israel shouldn’t have been allowed to participate in the games. How’s that for a lousy suggestion and uninformed opinion?

Day after day we hear of another bombing, another two dozen or more civilian deaths, and there’s hardly a peep from the rest of the world. We’ve moved way beyond “Israel has a right to defend itself.” What’s happening in Gaza are crimes against humanity, and Israel’s scorched earth response, besides hobbling Hamas, will most likely only have provided fertile ground for the next resistance movement.

Granted, the Palestinians need to provide assurances that they are willing to coexist. And any remnant of Hamas or its evolutionary descendant must also change its stance on Israel’s existence as a sovereign nation. It can’t continue to hold that Israel must be driven from the land and destroyed. That obviously will serve as a non-starter and will not be helpful or acceptable.

All sides need to chill, but what are the chances of that ever happening? This insane cycle of retribution is itself hard to kill.

What would happen if they set aside their holy books and dared to talk to each other, as people who are dreaming of living in peace in a place they call home?

An identity crisis would probably ensue.

I suppose one could put an asterisk beside everyone’s medal totals, since Russia wasn’t participating. Then again, why wasn’t Russia participating, except for a small contingent of athletes who couldn’t compete under the Russian flag?

I thought it must have been because they couldn’t swear off the juice, the illicit HGH and such, but it was actually because they invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.

Kind of surprising they honored the prohibition. One might think Putin and the rest would get heavy-handed, demand to participate, find a way around the ban, invade IOC headquarters or something. In any event, rules are rules, and the IOC said no to Russian participation. Good for them.

And way to go, Vladimir. You ruined a perfectly good opportunity for your athletes to showcase their skills, all because you’re on some ill-advised quest and refuse to read the room.

The Wall Street Journal has published an article entitled, “Will Donald Trump Blow Another Election?”

Such a question betrays the assumption that the election was/is Trump’s to win in the first place. In the months and years since the 2020 election and January 6, Trump has somehow remained a viable candidate despite everything he’s said and done that might give most reasonable people cause to wonder how he’s still standing.

One could argue that the upcoming election in November includes a Republican candidate who shouldn’t have been eligible to run this time around—for legal reasons and because he is such a flagrantly flawed, incompetent, and unpleasant human being.

Blow another election? This would seem to imply that his loss in 2020 somehow came out of left field, rather than being an indication that the public was tired of him, leery of him, and finally on to his shtick—that he was, in reality, the furthest thing from an “everyman” candidate. If Trump blew his chances in 2020, it was because the curtain was pulled back on who he really was. Well, that and he’s got the fatal flaw of opening his mouth and speaking.

The fact that, despite a new ticket and new life on the Democratic side, the election is apparently still close at this point simply boggles the mind. A candidate with highly suspect motives, with no platform except Project 2025, and a plan to infiltrate election boards in swing states with election deniers should be all anyone needs to know about Trump and the party that props him up.

Trump is a straw man, and the GOP– or whatever this iteration of the Republican Party is– is a party tilting at windmills, suffering from a dearth of good ideas, and too eager to pay homage to the dark side.

I saw a meme the other day with a bit of geriatric wisdom: At 70, your body tells your brain about things it’s not gonna do anymore. Or something like that.

I have to say that there’s truth in this, though it’s also true what people say about still feeling little different than when you were twenty, even as your body is trying to tell you otherwise.

It’s an interesting dynamic. The joints are a bit creaky, the knees don’t bend as readily as they once did, and I do run like an old man now. I have a bit of brain fog on occasion but still have the same sense of wonder and curiosity about certain things, the same sense of humor and manner of speaking. I‘m reading more than I ever have, though I have to reread the occasional passage because I start daydreaming or am distracted by something.

I have reached a point where there is less that impresses me, and it doesn’t take much for the bullshit meter to peg anymore. I’ve never been a driven person, so any vestige of ambition is directed at buying the next tool for the shop, or keeping the yard looking trimmed and presentable.

Such lofty and altruistic aspirations.

In contrast to those days when I might have been considered community-minded and sociable, I am more intent on and selective in picking my interactions. I prefer to be more of a hermit now, am comfortable in that skin, which, I believe, is probably who I’ve been all along. The twenty-six years in the ministry were an aberration of sorts, a thousand miles from the nearest comfort zone. They were a real stretch for me, to put it mildly.

I can’t follow the political developments on a regular basis. It’s too loud, people talk too fast and try to cram everything into confined time frames because they have to work around the myriad breaks for words from their sponsors. Commercial television is hard to watch. Even PBS has conceded somewhat to advertisers and modified the way they handle their financial supporters, but at least they get everything out of the way up front.

Anyway, the news often feels like a cascading waterfall that just keeps dumping on us who stand underneath. It’s hard to talk, hard to breathe, hard to digest because we keep getting pummeled. There are too many contrived questions from panels of experts and pundits in the pursuit of filling airtime with… something, anything, hopefully a decent query that engenders a thoughtful, enlightening response, but often enough just boilerplate stuff that we’ve already heard somewhere else.

And now we get to endure the endless back and forth and analysis of the two tickets, likely complete with the latest low blows and dumb comments from Trump, along with the inevitable dramatic developments and dug-up dirt that always seem to materialize.

Hey, it’s still better than a lone anchor sitting at a desk being fed the official party line handed down from the Ministry of Propaganda, or whoever.

More frequently, we’re hearing it said out loud: the sheer number of natural disasters is taking a toll on peoples’ capacity to cope.

Floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat—it’s all starting to tear at infrastructure and the fabric of normalcy and sustainability, and the limits of human endurance. The damage from storms and such is so widespread that there is dwindling hope of recovery and rebuilding for many, and of insurance companies being willing and able to cover losses.

The simple yet totally unsurprising fact is that global warming and human-induced climate change is not only real, but is awakening people to the realization that life as they’ve known it is likely being permanently interrupted. The new normal looks to be having to deal with a steadier stream of dangerous and destructive weather, and the accompanying realization that the planet we live on and have taken for granted is slowly reclaiming itself and dispatching the source of its discomfort—which is us.

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