A never-ending roller coaster ride can’t be good for the human body. A constant release of endorphins and adrenaline can’t be healthy. Constant highs and lows, emotions that run the gamut from hopefulness to seething anger and little actual peace, will, one might think, wreak havoc on the average person’s well-being.

We’ve been “through it” as a nation, over the last four years in particular, struggling through a pandemic, having to listen to a dumb, incompetent man who ended up as President, putting up with insane and incessantly incendiary rhetoric from a news outlet created solely to mess with our heads and spew bullshit and badmouth the decent human who took over the Presidency from the aforementioned idiot in what, by any account that matters, was a free and fair election in 2020.

We’ve had nothing but a pile of gristle on our plates for the past 8 years– even while Trump was out of office!– and a ridiculously large number of us say, in all seriousness, that they want seconds.

Trump is seeing how far he can push things, finding out where the boundaries are. That’s all he wants. He doesn’t really want to be POTUS, from the standpoint of actually having to do the job. He just wants what in his mind is the satisfaction of retribution, possessing what he thinks has been rightfully his since November of 2020.

He has no idea what to do if he were to get there again, other than drink in the power and bask in the limelight, pardon the “victims” of January 6, dismiss the cases against him, and tear the world apart in numerous ways.

I hope the center holds and poll workers can do their jobs. One has to believe that there are more motivated voters who want nothing to do with him than there are those who are on an IV drip of the Kool-Aid and haven’t been thinking straight for a while now.

Everything related to Trump is about plotting and strategy, about what’s gonna work best for him so he can keep winning… whether it’s the 2024 campaign or the 91 felony counts he faces.

The latest blood-boiling attempt at interference comes amidst efforts at hammering out a border deal, currently being discussed by both major parties. It seems Trump doesn’t want the deal because it will make Joe Biden look good and take away something he, Trump, was planning to campaign on.

To the Senators who now act like they don’t know what to do: ignore the son of a bitch and get the deal done!

How can this lowlife impostor have so much influence? It boggles the mind.

I find it distasteful and discouraging that pundits and reporters can declare the Republican nomination process to be pretty much over already.

There is no satisfying answer to “How can this be?” because we’re still dealing with an irrational base and a candidate who has never been good with taking No for an answer, who cannot bring himself to simply walk away for the good of a political party and the country.

Trump’s motives are obviously lowbrow and self-serving. He possesses not one public service bone in his body. He’s gonna leave it to the dark-minded incompetents around him to run the day-to-day things, and his main role, if he were to prevail in November (with sentences possibly handed down, and indictments and felony counts still looming), would be to continue as the mealy-mouthed front man he’s always enjoyed being. Playing POTUS, saying ridiculous, dangerous, mind-numbingly dumb things all the time. And in position to wreak havoc with the Justice Department.

His motives for seeking the office are no secret. And they are all nefarious.

Of course, echoes of the time-worn lament will reverberate in many a brain: “How could we let things get this far? Again!”

As tired as many may be, as ready as many may be, it is difficult to shake the feeling that a misguided, perpetually angry remnant of religious zealots will always exist, eventually rise, and do their best to sabotage what many would consider progress, a path toward peace.

The animosity between Israel and Hamas, between Israel and Hezbollah, between Israel and Iran, for so long seeming intractable and irreconcilable, can only turn a corner if, somehow, religious belief takes a back seat, or if people can be guided by canons within canons of their holy books that speak to peace and love—not hatred and mistrust and retribution and revenge and violence and infidels and unresolved history and endless savagery and all the other unhelpful imagery and messages.

It seems there are enough people who prefer peace to perpetual war, but what keeps them from moving forward is the authority they lend their holy books. It may seem impossibly hard to separate oneself from the holy writ, whether it’s Torah or the Koran, but it’s adherence to and interpretation of these very things that have perpetuated the misery all along the way.

What is so hard about living and letting live? Where people have a homeland in which to live peacefully, practice their religion peacefully, make a life peacefully—with the understanding (and maybe this is the hard part) that the gift is having room to coexist, since God has apparently chosen to speak in different ways to the citizens of Earth.

There is no winning, no best or only religion. People have to come to terms with this, and with the limits of evangelizing and proselytizing. Invitation works better than command. There is something to be said for learning to shake the dust off one’s feet and being able to move on.

There is no significant unity among religions. And if there is something that unites us all, many seem unwilling to invest the time and energy to look for it. It’s easier, or somehow feels more natural, to have a bone to pick.

One might rightfully wonder why a Loving, All-knowing Creator of the Universe would choose to operate this way– where some, many, across faith systems, behave as if they have a corner on perfect knowledge and understanding of what God is trying to tell us.

Frankly, it’s equally easy to get the impression that God doesn’t have it all together yet, and we’ve been suffering because of it. For a very long time.

A synthetic Paul Harvey voice touts Trump as a godsend in a way-over-the-top video. Yikes. AI has the potential to really mess with us.

Has anyone else envisioned a scenario where no one knows what’s real anymore? What’s truth? What and who counts as a trustworthy source?

Some AI bot telling people not to vote in a primary? That’ll be considered quaint by springtime, if not before.

Just another layer of subterfuge to be aware of as this election year unfolds. You can bet Russia and others are all in. Probably even the political parties here in the U.S. And it won’t just be Republican rogues—everyone will want to try their hand at it.

Sounds like a real rat’s nest.

To me, trying to listen to people like Trump, or MTG, or Jordan or Scalise or Cruz or the Johnsons– Ron or Mike– pretty much anyone on the right– is difficult because it doesn’t take long for them to start sounding like they’re just spitting words out before they forget them.

It’s like they’ve been given the words they must speak from some master list of talking points, and it doesn’t take long for them to sound a little—or a lot—off. The paranoia comes through, the provincialism and shallowness come through, the anger and naivete come through.

They’re all throwing spaghetti at the wall, spouting inane and insane rhetoric designed to throw shade at somebody and keep in the good steads of King Trump. It’s hard to take any of them seriously because their attempts at sensible, productive dialogue are so infrequent.

For many of the hotheads, it’s just hiding behind a Bible they don’t know how to read, spouting ridicule, accusing, blaming, defaming. Nothing of value exits their mouths, and the belief among many across the aisle is that there is no hope for them, that they want an America we must never return to.

Trouble is, their pathetic attempt at casting a vision for the country seems to be finding many receptive ears. There are many who aren’t averse to returning to the 1950s, apparently, or maybe even further back than that.

What’s striking is that Trump actually appears to believe he has something important to say, and that his audiences must of course be hanging on every word he utters.

Hate to break it to you, Donald, but you’ve got nothing. You never have. You’re an empty windbag, a narcissist who probably loves pontificating in front of the mirror before your biggest fan. Or is it that you look in the mirror anymore and realize you’re too far gone?

You’re a gameshow host who got some airtime and recognition, a guy who simply conned angry, frustrated people into thinking you were their savior, some big deal who spoke their language and—somehow—identified with them. That may be the cruelest con of all.

What are you still doing here? Your fifteen minutes ended a long time ago.

I’ve reached the point where I don’t want to check the newsfeeds in the morning.

I know what I’m liable to find there—thumbnails of an angry Donald Trump complaining and whining and fabricating, more bad news about Gaza, maybe a hopeful article about a possible ceasefire; the US getting deeper into it with the Houthis and who knows who else; an article about potentially deadly microorganisms being exposed in the Arctic because the permafrost isn’t so perma anymore. Worst case scenario at this point, but it sounds plausible.

Then more articles about the dysfunctional Republican party, the hopeless pursuit of the nomination by DeSantis and Haley, a head-scratching return to support of Trump, along with the regular reminders that we live in a violent society with too many damned guns.

There will usually be some mention of the stock market’s rise and the economy’s comeback and resiliency, despite other articles that highlight a weird disconnect between good economic numbers and peoples’ own sad economic situations (are they, really?). And they blame Biden to boot. Just another piece of the political witchcraft always being employed—say something long and loud enough and people will start believing it.

And then we can’t forget about the 155 million Americans under some sort of meteorological warning of Armageddon—cold, snow, rain, tornados, flooding, locusts. Maybe not locusts.

I usually end up checking things out, anyway, always hopeful that I’ll see a banner headline that reports Trump has decided to drop out of the race, face the music, maybe retreat to Mar-a-Lago for the rest of his days, if he’s not placed somewhere else. He comes clean. He even tells his legion of braindead that he’s been misleading them all along and that they need to raise their standards. He apologizes to them and to the country, and the country actually accepts his apology.

Oh, that’s rich.

The unmoving, undeterred Benjamin Netanyahu needs to rethink his handling of the Gaza disaster. Has it ever crossed his mind that he’s doing to the Gazans what he feels has so often happened to his people?

Yes, there is no getting around what occurred on October 7, but have there been any moments when Bibi and his cohorts have stopped and wondered if they haven’t already killed enough Palestinians—and some Israeli hostages— and done enough damage, destroyed enough of their infrastructure and leveled enough homes and made it impossible for nearly the whole territory to return to anything familiar?

How can people live this way? On the one hand, how can Hamas operate in such a cowardly manner by running tunnels underneath hospitals and even consider using the civilian population as built-in hostages? What is this mentality? Civilians, human beings as meat, as acceptable collateral damage.

Anyway, it sounds like some cracks are appearing among Israeli government officials, some differing opinions and a building frustration with the scorched earth policy on which Netanyahu seems so unyielding.

Good. Maybe this leads to a pullback, a reconsideration, a ceasefire.

Netanyahu has always been a hardliner, and talking tough on war is one thing hardliners do. But one might dare imagine that somewhere in Bibi’s thinking might emerge the thought that the relentless, scorched earth violence being perpetrated on Gaza will not—maybe cannot—eradicate Hamas, and will actually serve to create a whole new brand of animosity with different players, motivated by dreadful loss and seething anger and desire for vengeance.

The same old fuel sources, with a whole new generation of actors.

It is sad to think that there aren’t enough people who want to sit down and hammer out a solution that leads to coexistence, a two-state solution, where the sides create a framework for a lasting peace, where people have grown so averse to war that they are able to put aside their religious zeal and actually take a step down a more peaceful, trusting path.

The people of Israel, the people of Gaza– all Palestinians– must be exhausted beyond empty, and tired of living constantly under some threat of annihilation, caught in an endless cycle of defense and retaliation. How can anyone live this way forever?

If peace talks and discussions ever materialize, maybe the participants will need to leave their Tanakhs and Qurans at home. Leave the holy books out of it. Because there will never be peace if this boils down to just another godfight.