It is 7:09 PM on Tuesday October 3rd, 2017. The house painting is done. It has taken a long time for me to finally get things that needed to be done to the house finally finished. The roof is also repaired, the upstairs window caulked and the gardening done. The house now looks really nice and just in time for the rainy season. I’ll finally have peace of mind during that first storm.
Time continues to go very quickly and perusing a few of my old friend’s FB profiles I barely even recognize them anymore. Some look better than others as time has definitely taken its toll. I now see why many men have a midlife crisis: it is the realization that life is half over and those that are not where they want to be go a bit off the wall.
Luckily, I am where I want to be and had an excellent first half. I do feel a little sad that my days of exploring the world are over and I’ve been here in one place – San Francisco – for about ten years. What mitigates this desire to travel is that I still travel. We go to Japan every year and I can get my international fix. Also, San Francisco just isn’t like the midwest and most of our friends are ‘international.’
I would like to get back to Spain when the boys are over and like everything in life Spain is changing too. Catalonia is going for independence and the map continues to change just as it has for thousands of years. The change is slow and the thought of permanence fixes itself in our minds. We don’t see all the parts that are continually moving in our day to day lives and then one day something big has changed. In the case of Spain it will be losing the richest province of their country. The USA continues to change as well at a very slow pace.
It was just 100 years ago that slavery ended, then only 50 years ago desegregation happened. Up until the 80s people were still very unfriendly when black people moved into the neighborhood and so the suburbs developed which was white people basically fleeing or ‘white flight’ as they say. Growing up I thought all the racism was behind us but here it is again in 2017 in the form of frequent police killings, the Black Lives Matter movement and NFL players taking a knee.
All of a sudden the race issue is a national conversation again and we’re confronted with the fact that racism never went away, it was always there, just not so much in the mainstream media or on the national radar.
Added to this we’ve got an electorate that is completely divided getting their propaganda from whichever news source fits their belief system, a congress that cannot get anything done, and a President who is the worst catastrophe to ever happen to the USA. I still find it difficult to believe that the Trumpettes will eat up any type of lies and falsehoods that their media throws at them. It is even harder to believe that there are enough of them that they were able to elect Trump. I am still very unhappy with Clinton and the mess she made, all while shirking any blame for losing. It was always somebody else who caused her to lose.
Science has taken a backseat and been politicized. Really, how can people be so dumb? Tradition and superstition have ‘trumped’ rational thought and society simply cannot shake religion.
But going back to Congress I read that Speaker Ryan stated that gun control was not the answer and the Republicans have remained silent after the biggest mass shooting in the history of the USA. Ryan once said that we do not need to take away guns but rather improve care for the mentally ill. All the while they have voted to repeal healthcare over 60 times. Facts no longer matter, the truth no longer matters, we’ve come to an age where you just dump a lot of crap onto the news sources and people stop being able to process fact from fiction, reason for an endless stream of data coming from a source with which they agree. I’ve lost faith in humanity and almost wish AI would just take over everything. Let’s just shift government to AI and let a computer make all of the decisions so long as it doesn’t decide to wipe out a certain species that pollutes the planet, wages endless war, thinks of nothing but acquiring more and more while praying to an imaginary ‘God’ to make things better.
And so here we are, on the verge of a nuclear war with North Korea and the stupid President pushing it ever closer. Millions could die and if it did the Trumpettes would still find a way to rationalize it and I’m sure Trump would lose no support. The only way he would lose support is if his supporters were seriously damaged, such as the nuclear blast taking place in Alabama. Only then would it become ‘real’ to them. South Korean and Japan might as well be imaginary lands as they know nothing outside of their 50 mile radius within which they roam and stay. The world no longer makes any sense.
Reading the news the only one that does make sense is one in government who has traveled, who does understand the world and that is James Mattis. I saw that he said that the Iran nuclear deal should stay put (unlike the President) and I listen closely to what he says on North Korea. Trump is a complete disaster and so many things are not going to end well.
I imagine myself in the distant future when all hell has broken loose reading these very words wishing I could go back in time. These posts will bring me comfort to read about a time when the world was ‘less worse.’
Well, the time is 7:34 PM and shows no signs of slowing down. My eyelids are getting heavy and so it is time to go to bed; it is time to say goodbye to another day as we march relentlessly into the future and w a world that is changing very rapidly.
