I never know which of these missives from the deeper recesses of my mind are going to strike home and which are going to receive a collective yawn. I’ll write something that I think is brilliant. I have all of my metaphors just right, the parallel constructions are spot on, and I think I’ve made some major cathartic conclusion. Crickets. Then there’s something like my last piece which I thought was a semicoherent drivel. People are still discussing it a week later and it’s been shared all over the place. This is why I don’t spend too much time thinking about what I write and just let it flow. Usually the less thought, the more it seems to touch at something deep within readers. Nor do I know what the current writings are really about or what they might become. My publisher is surfacing this next week after a prolonged absence and we will begin discussing possibilities.
The bad news continues to creep in through every available enntrance. I spent the long weekend trying to avoid both television and written news reports to give myself a break but even then people would mention something in passing or I would be in a public place with the inevitable television attuned to one of the more conservative news channels barking twaddle and tommyrot into the air. I am, however, like Sally Brown, determined to continue to support my new philosophy of optimistic nihilism so I have decided it’s time to look for silver linings in all of this. There have to be a few.
Let’s start with Robert Kennedy Jr., DHHS, and the MAHA movement. There’s a lot of focus on vaccine denialism, destruction of confidence in public health institutions, hobbling of the CDC, the FDA, and other federal programs which have helped us stay away from things that can kill us at young ages without us having to think too much about it. But there are some nuggets of positivity which should be encouraged. And perhaps the first way to guide resisters back to science based thinking is to accept those ideas which make a certain amount of sense. A refocusing of society on proper nutrition and whole foods isn’t a bad idea at all. And the federal government is the correct entity to make better foodstuffs available to all, help eliminate inner city food deserts and through subsity and distribution, make a more wholesome diet easier to achieve. Another idea that is percolating up through the MAHA ranks is an elimination of direct to consumer perscription pharmaceutical advertising. I’m all for this. It should never have been allowed in the first place. We believe, in our culture, that there should be a magical cure for everything available in pill form and that eternal good health is the baseline and anyone not enjoying that is somehow being shortchanged by someone or something who can be blamed. Sorry, life remains a 100% fatal disease. Good health is just the slowest way to die.
Is there a silver lining in the tariffs and economic mayhem? Perhaps this will begin to curb American’s addiciton to cheap disposable consumer goods. We all have far more in our houses than we need and many of us spill over into storage spaces full of things we haven’t touched in years. A trend toward fewer possessions of higher quality would not necessarily be bad for us, our society, or the planet. People are also starting to become more interested in the macroeconomics of the economy as well as the microeconomics of the household. The more of us that get that, the more likely we’ll elect representatives who will help manage the economy for the advantage of ordinary Americans, rather than the current shoveling of all wealth to the top as quickly as possible.
The attempts to federalize law enforcement through calling out the National Guard for unnecessary reasons, the overreach of ICE, and the general attempts to stifle dissent to unpopular policies are having some effect. There has been a general increase in understanding of the constitution, especially the 6th amendment with its requirement that defendents be given their rights. Jeannine Pirro has now been foiled by grand juries seven times in the last month who declined to indict charges she brought. In the previous decade there were only eleven cases where a grand jury did not indict on a federal prosecutor’s evidence nationwide. It’s also worken up a portion of the Democratic party and they are actually starting to do political opposition work rather than try to just protect their campaign funding.
I’m sure there are others but I can’t think of them right now. I’m too tired. I’ve been immersed in a couple of legal cases which I have to have reviewed by the middle of the month. One of them is fairly straight forward. The other had 8,000 pages and they just sent me another 4,000 last week. It’s going to take awhile. At least, with nothing theatrical, I should be able to plow through it all. It just all has to be done by the first of October when I go into vacation mode for two weeks.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 