Wow, Maddow painted a frightening picture recently, regarding where we are as a country. Trump continues to linger, like raw chicken wrapped in newspaper and thrown in the garbage 2 days ago. The “recount” efforts are gaining steam in several states, and the big lie is taking hold, inspiring restrictive voting legislation also in multiple states.

We are watching our elected officials drink the kool-aid, wander aimlessly and mindlessly in Trump world, ignoring real needs and focusing on a paper tiger.

Everything feels tenuous, like we’re teetering at cliff’s edge. A monumentally selfish, angry, unstable man continues to clamor for attention, and people you’d think would know better appear willing to indulge him.

America The Beautiful, my ass.

I’ve given thought lately to an unsettling reality, prompted by the upheaval after George Floyd, in light of the current efforts to restrict voting rights, and after having read Caste, a book by Isabel Wilkerson. It’s something that, for almost the entirety of my life, has never been a topic of conversation or accorded a bit of attention.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and it’s had the effect of casting everything in a different light.

My life has had its share of ups and downs, but in a relative way has been a pretty smooth ride because of the pigment of my epidermis. Like every other human being on earth, this is something I had no control over or choice in, yet I have enjoyed privileges that I’ve never treated or understood as privileges, most neither earned nor expressly deserved yet still taken for granted. Mere benefits of a collective, deeply rooted bias based on nothing more than the whiteness of my skin.

And, sadly, supported in part by a selective and unfortunate interpretation of scripture, along with successive generations of people who have embraced and perpetuated a gross, monstrous lie.

Our last couple of trips to the big box or grocery store have been maskless. And the first thought or feeling that comes to mind has been gratitude. Just plain gratitude—for living where I live, for the people who developed the vaccines, for those who expertly administer them and keep the clinics running smoothly. For those who deliver the vaccine to sites all over the country. For the funding that allows us to receive the shots at no cost to us, though I guess if there was a paper trail, we’d find that we paid for them with our tax dollars? Money well spent, if that’s the case.

Anyway, I’m grateful that we’ve come this far, that this weird year-plus is beginning to fade into the past, something to read about someday.

Of course, much of the rest of the world is not in the same place. So there’s that. We need to be mindful of that.

Come on, America.

Stop waiting to be rewarded for something you should do simply because it’s a good thing to do.

Who doesn’t want a million bucks, or a 4-year free ride to a state university, or Super Bowl tickets, or a free beer, or a fishing license, or a hundred other perks being offered for getting vaccinated? Once again, we’ve arrived at reinforcing the tried and true “What’s in it for me?”

The shots are free, and I guess it’s not really about long-term unknowns or quick-to-market jitters. It’s just that the incentive wasn’t right.

B.F. Skinner was on to something.

Sometimes the contrast is striking, even comical. I’m sitting here thinking about how to clean the kitchen, mowing the lawn, maybe buying a good de-thatching rake. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is making threats toward us and, for all I know, contemplating world domination, or at least how to destroy America. What an evil-eyed gnat.

How does he occupy his day? Does he care about the people he governs, or is it more about the perks and the power?

He must always be watching his back.

Good for the Texas Democrats—boycotting and denying a quorum for a session of the state legislature that would have voted on the latest restrictive voting regulations. Probably postponing the inevitable, but it’s a visible gesture and great big fuck you to all who obviously aren’t above trying anything that makes it harder for minorities to vote. It’s so blatant, reactive, and un-American. Well, it is American but something many have hoped would have disappeared by now.

Instead of self-evaluation and maybe even evolution, the Republicans are choosing to “stand their ground,” preserve their “principles,” play politics, buy the lie about an election being stolen from their Supreme Leader.

Basically, they’re just trying to hold on to power, however that can be accomplished.

I seem unable to write without a tinge of cynicism and skepticism. I’m just another uncreative critic who can’t find happiness. A glass-half-empty guy who looks for something to gripe about. Geez.

Confusion on the mask issue? Not really a surprise. People don’t know if they can trust each other? Again, not really a surprise. It’s like there can be no baseline of knowledge upon which we all agree, especially as this applies to respecting the virus and its knack for showing up when we for some unknown reason think it shouldn’t be around. Enough of us have never really respected the virus. There’s respect for the doomsayers and crackpot theorists, but not for the doctors and researchers and scientists who actually know something useful.

Is Louis DeJoy for real? Is he still doing Trump’s dirty work, right under our noses? Is there a method to his madness, a wisdom that we’re just not seeing? From all appearances, it seems this is not the case.

Why does Marjorie Taylor Greene warrant a platform? Comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust? Sure, she’s a “newsmaker” of sorts. But should she even be worthy of coverage? Why waste the time and energy following her around? Her demeanor shouts ugliness. She’s angry and ignorant, maybe vindictive. A real irritant, a true right-wing nut job. Determined to make noise despite, or because of, being relieved of certain duties. So of course, she’ll get coverage one way or another. We have to put up with a lot because of free speech. I’m not sure this is the brand of free speech all our soldiers have died to protect. Or maybe it is. Free is free, I guess. Which is OK, as long as we have the option of disagreeing with it and either tuning it out or making it stop.

The more I watch my networks of choice, the more I realize that the 24-hour news cycle is somehow unsustainable and even unnecessary. There’s a need to fill airtime and say something, anything, often over and over again, until a topic is treated in depth by multiple pundits and experts and finally beaten to death. What strikes me the past couple of days is how my anchors and hosts of choice are really running with the developments in the Trump civil and criminal cases. Coverage from every angle, seemingly willing the outcomes into existence, hoping against hope that this time Trump gets what’s coming to him. And the whole time, over on the fox, a totally different message is being distributed, with just as much passion and conviction and loudness.

News media are all aflutter with the “bombshell” revelation that the former civil investigation of the Trump “empire” has morphed into a criminal investigation.

Stop the presses, apparently.

Does anyone really think that any of this is going to go anywhere? Give me one reason—ONE reason—why this is at all significant. Colbert and others recognize the futility in getting our hopes up.  The bum will blame everyone else around him, and nothing will happen.

Trump is the true Teflon Man, though I’d be more than happy to eat my words.

Ghost guns? Brilliant.

What took so long to come up with a method of manufacturing untraceable weaponry that often enough ends up in the hands of people who want to use it to render bodily harm? Just brilliant.

Your Second Amendment rights in action, America. We should all be proud.

It’s an addiction worse than any other.

The longer I languish in this job (see my very first post), the more jaded I’ve become.

I suppose if one drills through the layers, there is a core of decency born of religious belief, a positive influence that comes to bear in the lives of believers. Maybe this is what guides some of those who get featured in the good news segments on the nightly news.

What’s been weighing on me is the darker side that gets covered earlier in a broadcast. The Taliban bombs a school and kills scores of innocent girls who just wanted an education. Jews and Palestinians live in perpetual tension, on a tinder box that appears to have been ignited, again. And Christian politicians in this country peddle and preach a brand of conservative swill that informs platforms while often landing like fingernails on a chalkboard.

It’s a variation on “You can’t handle the truth!” No one really knowing what the truth is, yet thinking they all have a corner on it. It’s more whatever serves an agenda, born of convenience and laziness and misinterpretation. It is useful mainly as it feeds other beliefs and tendencies and presents at least the illusion of control.

When it comes to religion, we should leave things at invitation and call it a day, find peace with shaking the dust off and moving on. Because conversion is a bridge too far. You can’t tell people what to believe. You can’t blow people up and then expect true devotion and respect. You can’t legislate morality and expect people to fall in line. There must be room to take it or leave it.

Separation of church and state is one of the best ideas the founding fathers had. Religion can be a stick of dynamite in the hands of idiots who’ve had too much to drink.