What a ride! Collective whiplash is everywhere and trying to slow it down only does so much. We careen along, shedding whatever we can to lighten our emotional loads as we’re continously hit more and harder.
It’s exhausting.
The police shoot a man in the back seven times in front of his children, which becomes yet another link a chain that subsequently includes a teenager killing two unarmed protesters at point-blank range with an assault rifle, further laying bare the differences between the way our criminal “justice” system is applied depending on whether one is Black and White.
A global pandemic that, in rational times, would pull humanity together to protect itself, splits instead over the role cloth plays in keeping us safe.
A tiny powerhouse in a judicial robe leaves the planet with a single wish, which is ignored.
In his quest to remain in power for four more years, The Man at the Top urges the worst of his Devout Followers to stand by in the event that the rest of us attempt to conduct business as usual on Election Day. By which I mean “standing in orderly lines at the polls with our IDs in order to cast ballots or work within the limits of long-standing law to properly count them.”
And then, he and a large swath of his enablers, in part on account having led the charge against cloth that keeps us safe, join the millions sickened by the panedmic.
For those of us who believe that we’re no more than collections of random molecules caromming through time and space, that’s just another occurrence. For those of us who believe there is a deity that pays attention to what’s going on and at some point punishes the wicked, this is comeuppance.
Those in-between are caught between two poles. There’s the desire to rejoice at the comeuppance of this cabal of kleptocratic bullies who’ve misused power to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us while disregarding the oath taken by their boss to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” And then there’s the kinder urge, the more sensible part of us that recognizes the folly (and wrongness) of wishing ill on others.
We watch. We wonder what, if anything, we can do to somehow make it all come right.
the sentence factory 