Cheer up! We’ll All Be Dead Soon

We are all frogs swimming in boiling water

I get the feeling like I may have annoyed a lot of my readers last week with my Walt Whitman tinged “I Sing The Song of Myself” essay regarding the ecstasy of finding a soul mate and falling in love. I know if it was one of my friends who wrote it and it was a couple years back, I probably would’ve x’ed out by the second paragraph and thought, “There’s a relationship that’s going to crash and burn.”

Grand gestures like writing a whole Substack column celebrating one’s brand new relationship was as good as approaching the bandstand of life and putting in a request for a premature breakup. Nothing spells disaster quite like rubbing your good fortune in people’s faces.

Anyone who has known me since I was a wee youngun will attest to the fact that, I wasn’t just cynical, I was nothing short of misanthropic. Boys and girls, cats and dogs, doctors and nurses, everyone was full of shit and only fooling themselves. Everyone’s been wearing a mask for so long, even they start believing that it’s their face.

So, I do apologize for such a saccharine paean, but my being in such a rare season of passion, love and gratitude was necessary to correct my course on this vast ocean of bullshit.

Yes, and speaking of vast oceans of bullshit, I have another confession to make. When I saw that Trump got elected last November, I promised myself to not argue with his fans, I promised myself to be more tolerant of his followers and I promised myself to not pay any attention to the news.

As you might imagine, I have not been perfectly successful at any of those but, unless I’m being delusional, I do notice that I have improved quite a bit since the first shit show. Unfortunately, this is not an area where incremental improvement is acceptable. The quality of my life will always be directly related to how much or how little I burn brain cells thinking about how I’m watching the unthinkable unfold in slow motion.

The confusion that I used to have was how people can see the same things I see and not realize what’s happening. Those of us born around 1970 were scared to death of the United States being invaded by a fundamental government like North Korea or China and being held prisoner. We would shudder thinking about having to learn their language as we watch them occupy all of Manhattan and Washington DC.

But isn’t that what’s happening right now? Only the fundamental government is a bastardization of our own government by a reality TV star that half the country would follow into a burning building.

In the eighties and nineties, no one cared about who was president. You didn’t see people with big Reagan signs on their pickup trucks or Bill Clinton flags hung over people’s porches. This is really not normal.

The saddest part of all is that most of these millennials and zoomers don’t truly understand the core principles this country was founded on. Most of them will swear up and down that they know the contents of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but I don’t believe them.

For people to be cheering the government’s decision to turn the military on its own citizens, for people to be “hear hear-ing” the idea that people should not be allowed to protest what they are vehemently against is all the proof I need. No one who understands what our forefathers fought and died for could possibly applaud the United States becoming a police state.

Most of these doom scrollers have only really known a post 9/11 world. They weren’t fully aware of the Bush administration’s systematic dismantling of Constitutional protections in the name of “security” and defense.

Checks and balances were scrapped in exchange for the government to have the ability to make unilateral decisions to surveil their citizens for whatever half ass reason they give.

That was 2010. Much like the frog in the boiling water, no one realized that, as time went on, all pretense of impending national emergency went out the window. In 2025, the government can do whatever it wants and doesn’t need to have a specific reason, doesn’t need to inform Congress, and certainly doesn’t need to consider the lives of its citizens.

Imagine if you were never taught Civics or American History. Imagine if, instead of that, you stayed up every week to watch “The Apprentice.” It would not seem so far-fetched to vote for the guy from television that bullies all the people you don’t like or understand.

“He’s funny.”

“At least he tells it like it is.”

“It’s about time we have a guy in office who looks out for our interests for once.”

My friends who hover around my age see all these claims as the steaming load of horse manure that they are. Unfortunately, with our citizens being so uninformed, the presidency has devolved into a popularity contest.

The one consolation I try to tell myself is that I only have fifteen, maybe twenty years left on the outside. So, it seems pointless to get too worked up. Seniors in high school who get a full ride to Harvard or Berkeley don’t cry when they realize they won’t be around the next year to try the Apple Brown Betty. They focus on what lies ahead.

I suggest we all do the same.