Something’s got to give

2017. Not the best year, was it?

Some of the country’s on fire, some of the country’s under water, some of the country’s getting snow where they never do, and some of the parts that usually get snow could use a little more. And, to top it all off, me even saying some of the words might get me dragged off to a camp or slapped for saying the no-no words about climate change. Honestly, looking at the day-to-day it’s hard to tell what lies in store. Some days, it looks like the world’s about to be annihilated in a fireball of our own making, and some days it looks like the fireball’s only going to take half the world with it, so… compromise, I guess.

And man, I can never spell annihilated right.

Of course, the Chicken Little approach to life isn’t one that’ll keep anyone very happy or make you a lot of friends. As I mentioned in a previous commentary article, this must be how my parents, the Boomers, made it work with the threat of a Russian bomb exploding Topeka always over their heads. You find time to look at the good things and you find time to smile: I have two glorious children and one chubby cat, and all three of them sometimes stop talking long enough for me to think. But, in reality, I don’t think I’d rather have it any other way. Little Tim, now only eight months old, has already learned two of the most important words in life, those being “Mama” and “more,” and Cindie not only asks more questions than a Benghazi panel, but has taken to adding her own words to classical music and nursery rhymes. So, inside the concrete walls of my dream house with my dream family and my dream wife (who I won’t go into too much detail about because she’s the only one in the family who can smack me one) life is pretty good.

But then… you go outside.

Something has got to give here, folks. We on the Left have been ready to blow since 2008, maybe 1992, and now we’re finding ourselves finding a lot more in common with our neighbors on the Right than with our own supposed “Leaders” in Washington… and that includes the President. The guy who ran on helping “The Forgotten Man” has done more to put the screws to you and I than almost anyone thought possible, and his biggest so-called “victory” has been a massive tax break for billionaires. Yes, we down here get a tax break…for a few years, and then ours go back up… but guess whose don’t? Yup, the rich. Mr. Outsider-in-Chief has turned out to be as much of a tool of the system as anyone, and that’s why you’re seeing folks on the Left and the Right look at each other across Main Streets all over the country and say hey… we all deserve decent food, clean water, and decent homes, don’t we? So why does one billionaire have 33 homes? Why does another pay to have an empty private jet fly behind his private jet, just in case?

I’m serious, go look both of those up.

At what point does this just stop making sense to anyone with half a lick of good sense, red or blue? It’s starting to, and the biggest worry I have is how that’s going to play out. I mean, I don’t want to have to raise my kids in a time of crisis but, for a lot of folks reading this, the crisis might already be here… and when a crisis is already here, when do people stop caring about what trouble they might get in if they do something? There was no definite starting point to the Great Depression, or the rise of Fascism, or even World War II. No one shot off a gun and said “go”! These awful events happened little by little until the system couldn’t hold up under the BS and folks got sick of drowning in it.

Something’s got to give, and every day I find myself wondering when… and how.