I may be coming to the end of my string on Twitter. Making
jokes about Trump gets old after a while, if for no other reason than he never
changes. It’s the same thing over and over again. You can’t be clever
swinging at the same softballs over and over again.
Add to that, Twitter is beginning to wear me out. I’ve been
around a long time, and lived through some difficult periods, but I don’t think
I’m wrong in thinking that this one is the worse. We have terrorists active
around the world, and little likelihood of shutting them down any time soon, if
ever. We have leadership in our country that is vile in so many ways,
deliberately spending its efforts limiting people’s rights and willfully
destroying the environment for financial gain, doing everything possible to
avoid cross-aisle rapprochement to get anything positive done for the country,
whose entire vision is to undo everything that’s already done because,
apparently, it was done by a Black guy. We have an accidental minority
president with apparently no political sense, a selfish boor who hides his
questionable finances, publicly maligns anyone he perceives as an enemy, has no
sense of international responsibility and no understanding that the world is
more complicated than the latest conspiracy theory on Fox News. He will never
be anything but our worst president. A president any worse would be our
last.
Our country, built on principles of democracy and freedom, a
city upon a hill with a Statue of Liberty in its harbor welcoming tempest-tost
immigrants, turns out to be populated primarily by myopic xenophobes, while
armed lunatics strike with mind-numbing regularity for no other result than to
encourage the NRA to claim that arming lunatics is not the problem. Our
population is incapable of recognizing the difference between facts and
fiction, and does not have the equipment to seek truth when the recognition
might not be that simple. Science, which is nothing more than the tools, mental
and otherwise, to understand reality, is disdained as hucksterism, and the
results of scientific method, which by definition is the proof against
hucksterism, are discounted as opinion rather than fact. The issues of racism
and sexism, brought to the forefront of the country’s consciousness during the
1960s, are issues only marginally addressed in the fifty years since, and
ingrained prejudices of previous generations are only slightly less ingrained
in the generations of today, if that.
Other countries around the world are hit and miss. The
Middle East is a mess, and Europe reels from the repercussions. China seems to
be doing okay, but their unfettered growth has created cesspool cities that
shut down because of fatal pollution levels and their human rights record is
hardly better than under strict Communism. Countries like Pakistan and North
Korea have nuclear weapons, and in the former case shaky leadership that could
give rise to putting those weapons into terrorist hands, and in the latter
case, bizarre leadership that has already demonstrated no unwillingness to use
them. The UK is about as culturally schizophrenic as the US, Russia’s oligarchs
are bringing that country back to its swaggering power-hungry heyday, and how
many states in Africa are calm and comfortable and citizen-run?
Has it even been thus? I don’t know for sure, but I don’t
think so. Which brings me to my point. Do I have to keep facing this? Do I have
to obsess over it? Am I morally lacking if I turn my back and just concentrate
on my own little world? I certainly would be happier turning away from it. I
just don’t think I can. Will I keep obsessing over Twitter, checking the latest
horrors every time I blink away from whatever else I’m doing?
I don’t know. Probably, because I know myself pretty well
now, I’ll just take the odd breather every now and then, close my eyes, think
lovely thoughts, putter around doing the nice things I like to do, and then
shake myself and start all over again. But I want to make it clear. I am not a
happy camper. I am disappointed in the world I live in. I grew up believing
that we would improve things, and make the world a better place.
But I don’t think we’ve done squat.
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