Don’t Wish It Were Easier. Wish You Were Better.
A couple of notes from my frosty run Sunday morning.
First, I noticed I was still sick to my stomach about the events at the at the US Capitol on Wednesday. I also felt heartsick thinking that some people I love and respect might have thought I was blaming them, in my last post, just because they happened to vote for POTUS 45.
As I wrote Thursday, “Whether I ever understand the cult-like following, and the Kool aid drinking, and the loyalty, that is not the man I want to be.”
That’s how people are when they lash out and have road rage. I just didn’t know what else to say and lumped everyone together all in that same crowd, while hoping “all those hooligans get COVID.”
It is cloying in my throat to remember that.
I thought to myself “heart sick” and “sick to my stomach” and wondered, more whimsically, what other organs are sick.
Then I remembered our great New England philosopher Denis Leary, who said, in his immortal song, “I’m An Asshole,”
Folks, I’d like to sing a song about the American Dream
About me, about you
About the way our American hearts beat way down in the bottom of our chests
About that special feeling we get in the cockles of our hearts
Maybe below the cockles
Maybe in the sub cockle area
Maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys
Maybe even in the colon, we don’t know
I’m just a regular Joe with a regular job
I’m your average white, suburbanite slob
I like football and porno and books about war
I got an average house with a nice hardwood floor
My wife and my job, my kids and my car
My feet on my table and a Cuban cigar
So I lightened up a little about my own cockles, liver and colon and laughed at myself, and then later ran into these lines from Stuart Stevens in his book It Was All A Lie (2020) —
“When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team… They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side.
Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron.”
Sound familiar?
I have long felt that our discourse occurs more like rabid fans who are just cheering on their team. Stevens says it perfectly. My feelings about “the other side” (i.e. my fellow Americans) are as Neanderthal as my joining with other Red Sox fans in saying “Yankees suck.”
Oh, sure, it’s fun and tribal, but there’s a little more at stake right now.
My other thought, while running, was “Man, why does this all have to be so hard?” And, like an answer to prayer, I heard the late Jim Rohn saying “Don’t wish it were easier. Wish you were better.”
