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Monday Lament: Things Weren’t Okay
Despite being called a pessimist, I thought things would be okay. If not right at the moment, they were heading in the right direction. You can maintain optimism at the worst of times if you think things will get better.
It’s not as if the sheer quantity of evidence did not warn us of the perfidy of life and the true evil lurking in humanity’s heart, but even our pessimism was optimistic. It was hard to be truly worried when your elementary education included weekly films that all seemed to feature great smokestacks belching black clouds into the air, accompanied by patriotic music.
Our cars made us free. What could go wrong?
We tried to help with the Civil Rights Movement and marched against the war in Vietnam. The national political reality was the sullen ugliness of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, but Nixon was forced to resign by Congress when the Republican Party turned on him, and Agnew went to prison over the Watergate break-in.
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but it really happened. Someone should tell Pam Bondi what happens to corrupt AGs acting as attack dogs for criminal presidents, but I’m sure she would just laugh. Hell, I just laughed.
We lost the storyline after Watergate. The political system is corrupt; half the politicians are low-order criminals, and only the white male…
