I know I should shift gears and write about something besides the sad state of our politics or the pile of dry tinder in Europe, but it’s difficult to ignore the reality that human beings are basically animals with a superior brain that sometimes gets used for beneficial things.

Maybe we are foragers at heart and we’ve never learned how to handle evolution that happened too quickly. We have the capabilities to find solutions, but our instincts win out– they are stronger than certain less prominent impulses. Instincts that lead us down the path to war and strife and pain and suffering, over and over again.

We keep hitting our heads, putting our hands on a hot stove. Over and over.

“Never again” doesn’t hold water. It’s the infuriating inevitability of the downward spiral—that, in the end, we’re powerless to fix things, condemned to making the same mistakes ad infinitum. Maybe our brain isn’t all that superior, and peacemaking will be the mainstay of some future iteration of human.

If we’re around that long.

Trump and Noem. There you go. That’s the ticket—the one that would reinforce the notion that the Right has lost its mind. That would make it official.

First of all, who in their right mind would want to be Trump’s VP, especially this time around? And second of all, why is Trump still standing? The fact that he’s the bona fide Republican candidate for POTUS in 2024 will provide fodder for anyone wanting to write a book on this period of American history. It’s an ugly, albeit interesting time to be alive.

Played golf for the first time this year. I played like someone who hadn’t touched a club since October, not to mention as one who only gets out 3 or 4 times a year to begin with. In other words, I expect way more than I have a right to.

It’s a bit like riding a bike, after a long layoff, but there are so many things that can go wrong with a golf swing that I couldn’t begin to analyze my shortcomings or do anything about them beyond altering my grip or stance. I just play, and revel in the opportunity to be out on a beautiful course, enjoying the good company and the occasional decent shot.

We didn’t hold anyone up, which can’t be said for some who decide that a lost ball is worth 10 minutes of their time, or others who linger on the greens and take practice strokes and just generally behave like they own the place. Fortunately, most follow the rules of etiquette and are mindful of the pace of play, which is important to anyone who doesn’t want to spend 5 hours on the course being aggravated. That’s not good for the mindset.  

I’ve never been one for saving for a rainy day. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the thinking behind it. It’s more that I look at money as something to enjoy in real time. I’ve never made a lot of it, and still have this wildly optimistic feeling that some windfall is gonna come our way and allow us to live a little easier…

Short of that, the current monthly income gets us through to the next 4^th Wednesday but without a lot to spare. And to be honest, I’ve lately been of the mind that the way things are going in the world, it’s time to start enjoying the fruits of our years of labor without worrying about how much is left at the end of the month, or how every single penny is spent. I really can’t be bothered by that level of discipline and tight-waddery (probably not a word).

We won’t be draining bank accounts anytime soon, at least on purpose, but I am even less bound by concerns about prudent fiscal decision making than I used to be. That ship sailed a long time ago, and I never got close to coming aboard.

If Armageddon comes, then we’ll lean on each other and feel blessed to have family around with whom to face the challenges. If the end of civilization isn’t nigh, then we’ll try to enjoy whatever good years we have left and not lose sleep over an occasional brush with frivolity.

I am no one’s subject, or at least that is not my natural proclivity. Nor is it anyone else’s.

Juval Harari spends some time in his book Sapiens… talking about the development of cultures, conquests and conquerors, making it sound like the aim of Cortes and Khan and the Roman emperors was to subjugate the masses and control them, to spread their influence as far and wide as possible and keep their “subjects” in line. Keeping them happy and content wasn’t necessarily their first order of business. Benevolence wasn’t necessarily a strong suit of history’s overlords, though some were better at it than others.

Maybe not surprisingly, nothing much has changed. The tools of control and group think have evolved, but the impulses are the same, sadly.

Case in point: while America drools over the Kardashians and cranks up the Country and Western drivel, Russia and China are plotting their strategy to ruin us, to tear us down and topple what they see as our hold on the world. Time for a new world order, in their eyes, and they can’t be bothered with the distractions and fluff and useless things that seem to distract if not enthrall many of us here in the states. Putin and Xi are thinking about control and conquest, while we go about “doing us” and arguing over whether or not two old men, one of whom is a convicted felon and an all-around asshole, should get to be POTUS.

Domination still plays, still rules, whether or not the people of Ukraine or Taiwan or anywhere else on earth agree. Of course we need leaders and a sense of security and direction, but we don’t need strongmen and fascists and self-interested idiots who seem to want to treat human beings as pliable, easily-manipulated fodder and playing pieces in their endless efforts to keep a stranglehold on power.

National interests aside, why has it always been so difficult for nations and leaders to live and let live, to give cooperation a try? Someone always seems to be in survival mode, convinced that it’s their way or the highway. Such insistence never, ultimately, ends well. Because people don’t like being subjects or pawns, or dismissed out of hand as sheepish and expendable.

June 6, 2024. Eighty years since the massive Allied invasion on the shores of Normandy, and the numbers of those who participated are, naturally, shrinking.

What will happen when there’s no one left? The cemeteries will remain, other memorials will remain, but the tangible connection with the humans who were there will go away.

I don’t think we need to worry about forgetting. I was born 10 years after D-Day and I have the date locked in the memory banks. There are many more like me, and younger, who will remind anyone who cares to listen.

Then again, would it be so terrible if the memory starts to fade? So much of our energy is invested in remembering the past, and most often our warring past. “Never forget” is both honorable and burdensome, an obligation to regularly remind ourselves of the pain humans are capable of inflicting, and the unimaginable, rage-inducing losses, the need to sacrifice everything because some assholes somewhere have designs on ruling the world.

Of all the things money has been spent on over the millennia, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to learn that the expenses and costs of war top them all.

And the human cost is staggeringly abominable.

It would be refreshing to be able to turn a corner on always remembering, and instead spend more time planning for progress in a more peaceful direction. But what are the chances of that ever happening?

In the blackness and vastness of the universe, our earthly spats and wars and human achievements and shortcomings and senses of beauty and all the absurdities we deal with are just whispers into the void. It all quite possibly falls on deaf ears.

From the vacuum of space, the beautiful blue marble might be a sight to behold, but from this side of the sliver of atmosphere that keeps us alive, there is much strife and ugliness. From out there, it’s all quiet beauty. From in here, it’s a freaking cacophony.

It’s not that it is difficult to find beauty and feel awe here on the surface of the only planet known to contain what we call life. It’s just that it feels like we’re heading toward a moment, toward an inexorable, premature culmination of some sort. Evolution has brought us to a time and place that would most likely be unfamiliar to our ancestors. And yet, evolution hasn’t brought us far enough.

We may be at the top of the food chain, we may have a spectacular brain, but it seems apparent that many are stalled at that stage of using their heads for nothing more than the proverbial hat rack. In the space where God exists, there might be love for everyone and everything, but in that space where reason and rationality rule and God seems more like a construct, exceptions apply. Judgement is passed, and a different reality competes for our attention.

The longer we live, the more likely it becomes that we’ll have a wake-up call. I suppose this could be attributed to maturation, to an accumulation of knowledge and experience– its own form of evolution– where perceptions change and a certain clarity emerges. We finally leave the womb and begin to breathe on our own. We are allowed to see the world as it is, and not as what others wish us to see. Cynicism may be part of this mix.

What I see is at once astounding and disheartening. Billions of divergent paths, and yet a movement in one direction. We are self-seeking beings told to care for others. We are products of our immediate environment, born into love and nurture or disregard and neglect, with parents who love us or who are indifferent, or for whom our existence is a bane to theirs. Depending on our country of origin and its form of government, we are products of certain histories and teachings, implored to follow the rules and think for ourselves.

The experiences of our early and formative years follow us into adulthood. We make course corrections as we are able, or we don’t. We take on the best and worst of those who are around us the most. At some point we attain a certain self-awareness. We learn to read, we observe and listen, and we start measuring and comparing things, things we’ve learned, things we’ve been taught, ideas that hatch in our heads. We make assessments, we decide what to keep and what to jettison. We interact, or we don’t. We engage, or we retreat.

I have no idea where this post is going, except to offer that earthly life is a messy thing. Our better angels are in near constant battle with the devil on the other shoulder. We catch regular glimpses of the ongoing titanic conflicts that rage among and within us. We may yearn for affirmation– that the way we see things is the right way, and all those others have it wrong.

Ah… so this is where I’m going.

What has transpired since Donald Trump emerged from his lair, and to some degree has always existed, is troubling me to an extent that I couldn’t foresee 9 years ago. The depth of Trump’s depravity, loosed on us all– even on those who still think he’s some sort of savior– conjures up a periodic need to grapple with this messiness, to try to understand what looks to me like blindness and self-seeking gone horribly awry. It seems our reality may be that, as much as we might like to skate through life unscathed, counting on some sort of self-correcting equilibrium or just a law of averages, we often get our turn at needing to stand our ground, needing to speak up and call out the bullshit we know to exist.

Relativism can buy us only so much time, until a turning point emerges. Not everyone can be right, at least as being right informs our continued existence as a nation born of lofty ideals and a daring vision. Whether or not we currently find ourselves returned to 1861, or the 1930s, we once again face a certain reckoning at the hands of people who, for a variety of reasons including a lust for power, have decided that government of the people, by the people, and for the people doesn’t work anymore. It’s too quaint a notion, and too hard.

So we have to deal with the crackpots, the wannabe despots, the wayward visionaries who are absolutely certain of the rightness of their cause, if they even know what that cause is. In the aftermath of the hush money verdict, almost the entire Republican party, along with the enablers at Fox News and the rest of their ilk, are doing their damnedest to stir up “righteous” anger and offense, while the folks at MSNBC and elsewhere are trying, with varying degrees of success, to contain their glee, trying to take the high road but predictably elated with the outcome, and intent on defending it.

Lady justice with the blindfold represents the ideal, and something our court system emulates with varying degrees of success. I’m with the folks at the peacock network and anyone else who’s defending the verdict and the process. Because I’m not the only who knows a skunk when I see one, or who stands clear of a pile of horseshit and calls it what it is. People are always happy or unhappy with verdicts, depending on where they sit.

Donald Trump stinks to high heavens, and has thumbed his nose at the rule of law for most of his life. Those who keep summoning contrived offense on his behalf, who keep defending him despite who and what he keeps proving himself to be– a deeply flawed and damaged human being unworthy of the office he seeks– need to stop the act. They’ve proven they’re great at spin and feigning righteous indignation, but need to find another horse to ride. They’ve ridden this one hard and put him up wet so many times that he– and they– don’t know which way is up anymore.

We have evolved. We have a brain, we can think and ponder, maybe even wonder. We can ask the existential “Why?”, which seems to be the hardest question to answer. Many are waiting for something more than “Just because.”

Beneath and behind “Why?” may lurk a search, a yearning, for divinity, for the all-knowing supreme being in charge of everything, someone who can shed light, offer clarification, set us on a path to enlightenment and an assurance that we’re not alone and things are going to work out.

Rickie Gervais, Juval Harari, many actors in Hollywood, the late George Carlin and Christopher Hitchens all share skepticism and even vehement denial that God exists. And in many pronouncements, one is liable to hear the familiar refrain about looking around at all the bad things that happen and blaming God for not being more involved.

In my journey of faith, or whatever this has been, I am slowly accepting the idea that maybe there is no God. It really does seem like more than coincidence that the development of most prominent religions happened back when we didn’t know an awful lot about how things worked.

The thing is, there will always be the matter of an expanding universe of mind-numbing mystery and beauty and proportion. And that lingering question—Why? And let’s not be too quick to dismiss the writings of Paul and others who still speak eloquently and insightfully to the human condition, human nature.

The criticism coming from atheists and agnostics often seems to land on a God who demands too much and isn’t around when you need him/her. A God who lets bad things happen with breathtaking regularity. I’m not sure this is the takeaway faithful scholars of the Word would want us to deduce from our reading and observations.

I resonate with certain peoples’ critiques of scripture, Old Testament in particular, with its archaic language and old ideas and pre-history and stories like God’s test of Abraham involving having to kill Isaac. Stories that are just that– good stories– and nothing more.

For me, it’s often the timetable. Time itself. It seems like we’ve waited way past long enough for redemption, for rescue, for resolution and a vanquishing of the steady parade of evil and incompetent leaders who seem to enjoy creating hell on earth.

This long cat and mouse game of needing to believe and having faith and trusting that there’s some sort of plan? There is a certain absurdity to it. And what to make of the plethora of belief systems and gods, many of whom are worshiped with great zeal and discipline?

We just keep waiting and hoping, perhaps unwilling to entertain the possibility that we really are on our own- a prospect that I still cannot bring myself to embrace.

And that question remains unanswered.

Why?

It’s just filling airtime, where value takes a back seat to merely creating content in an attempt to justify one’s existence.

This is how I’ve come to view much of what passes for journalism in the media ecosystem. Noise, fluff, bellicosity, competition ratcheted up to 11. It’s exhausting, too much.

The press, television, radio, even bloggers and podcasters are all integral parts of our need for information. They are a critical piece in keeping politicians honest. But a monster has been created along the way, by people with deep pockets and an agenda to push. Common sense is one casualty among many, perhaps a myth. And truth is splintered, relative, whatever it needs to be.

Maybe it’s always been this way, except anymore consumers aren’t as trusting as they once might have been. There’s still no shortage of gullibility and naivete, and the comforting presence and professionalism of Walter Cronkite has given way to ratings junkies and talking heads who seem to suffer from a chronic case of verbal diarrhea, many of whom live to start fires, stoke anger and spread doubt.

Republicans aren’t selling anything many want to buy. Their judgment appears clouded by a seeming obeisance to a loudmouth bully who’s finally getting his comeuppance. They’re collectively losing their shit, going into cornered rat mode, shamefully rallying around one of the greatest pretenders to ever hit the big stage. They apparently don’t mind walking around with his stench on their clothing, which makes them all smell bad. And look sad.