day by day drags on by frozen in place by violent tides an unstable tower of promises skin color disease and hope to heal or die but not suffer after all the poison is gone people need love the rest is loose and transient we end up together
The molecule that makes people camp out for days just to get a new iPhone a few weeks before their neighbor, is the very same one that drives people to rapidly refuse to wear a mask the more we ask them to. We need to de-escalate the stigma of it somehow.
The ego is the non-Newtonian fluid of our spirit. The more we force this issues, the harder they’re going to push back on it. More PSAs, less confrontations folks.
It seems like the pandemic hot spots are mostly just collections of groups people who all thought, “Man, that sucks for those people over there. But we should be okay, we’ve been pretty careful.”
Someone needs to do a study to figure out if OCD people are less susceptible to COVID-19, just by virtue of all of the ways we’ve learned to interact with the physical world while avoiding touching it at the same time.
Today I saw two fairly typical rural New Hampshirey kind of guys (white males, beards and baseball caps, obligatory work boots, and a variety of apparel from famed designers such as Mossie Oake and Coco Flanell) slogging hip deep through the roadside tick-grass dragging a massive sign that proclaimed: “Asians for Trump”. These guys were in the process of hammering it into the ground directly between myself and a bunch of very beautiful fall leaves. I absolutely hate political signs.
I suspect if I had actually pulled over and pointed out to these guys just how dense their political irony was, it would be as welcome from me as breaking the news about where fortune cookies actually come from.
The problem is that publicly voicing any sort of political speech these days is just as likely to get you shot, as get you are to get run over by a muscle car or big-ass truck with giant tires and a Punisher sticker on the back window. All while sustaining a barrage of colorful potty words, and various observations about your appearance and pedigree.
I am afraid that no matter who wins this presidential election, there will be violent reactions across the country, leading to far more deaths than there should ever be in a country with free and fair elections. And if you’re wondering just how many deaths should happen as a result of free and fair elections, the answer is zero.
Today I woke up to stories about anonymous police forces patrolling the streets of our nation’s capital. When asked who they were, they replied simply that they “work for the federal government”. Further investigation seems to suggest that they are from the Bureau of Federal Prisons. So what are they patrolling for? Who are they tasked with protecting?
This is probably related to the fact that only a few days after the President of the United States steamrollered masses peaceful protesters in from of the White House with tear gas and rubber bullets (citizens and press alike), apparently because His Orangeness was suddenly gripped with the overwhelming urge to go pose with a Bible like a grumpy Billy Mays trying to hawk some overstock.
Of course, that gem had been done in response to news reports that Trump and his family had been whisked away to a bunker for their safety after a horde of protesters broke through some barricades the night before in their attempts to have a word with him.
Needless to say, that too had a prequel: The senseless death of George Floyd at the knee of a white police officer. This event wasn’t so much a ‘spark in a tinderbox’ kind-of-thing, it was more like a “a bonfire in an ammo dump”, if you catch my drift.
Because, why? Because, before all of these things there was the countless other things that have happened. There has been three and a half mother fucking years of this slow moving coup. And they’re getting away with nothing more than Trump smashes a bunch of dishes in front of a camera, while McConnell and Barr run out the back door with the jewelry.
Why has everything suddenly escalated? Why is becoming more authoritarian with each passing event?
The election is coming soon, and the idea U.S. citizens voting almost entirely by mail is now a very real possibility, and therefore a very real threat to the GOP. They weren’t counting on COVID-19 helping to level the voter suppression playing field. But they’re not fighting like this just because they’re worried about losing their jobs.
Nope… They’re worried about a whole lot more than that.
After a few weeks of being hunkered down and working all kinds of weird hours doing mobile tech support for a couple of thousand users, I’m starting to get a chance to sit up and look around at where things are in the world.
But in doing so, I do so remotely. As do you, if you’re reading this. We have all been suddenly thrust into this strange new world that is partially shut down, and partially virtual.
For the first time in human history, we can continue to carry on large portions of the global economy through virtual methods. Virtual meetings, Internet-based commerce, digital banking, in-home entertainment, and the internet of things. Of course you can’t eat a Tweet. And the sooner we are able to get back to a more normal semblance of life, the better off we will all be.
But the reason I am writing this is to say thanks to a group of people that have been invisibly making large portions of what we do everyday possible at all. And that‘s because they’re the people who make all of our technology possible. From the network engineers, to the call center worker, including the electricians who makes all run, and the hardware repair folks who put it all back together when you break it at the worst possible time, even that annoying office tech guy who grunts every time he has to listen to you swear again and again that it’s not your fault that email hates you, all the ay our to the entire population of earth that is now available to me at the touch of a button on this powerful computer we still call a cell phone.
We live in a world that continues to move at an unprecedented speed, all doing so from our couches now. The whole thing takes a constellation of jobs and technologies to make it all work.
And for that, take a minute to just thank a tech person you rely on. And if you can, resist the urge to ask them a ‘quick question’, just this once.
Between that company in Germany Trump tried to get to exclusively make a vaccine for a America, and this latest story about him asking 3M to start shipping everything to America instead of other countries… it’s starting to feel like the story of some kid who wants to steal the exam he forgot to study for.
The Renaissance came after the Dark Ages because people had started to engage in critical thinking and using something that became known as the scientific method. The natural result was to grow away from the teachings of The Church at that time, because the results science was getting threatened the validity of the Church itself, the authenticity of its edicts, and its iron grip on power.
Now the United States has a leader who is in a position of power he neither earned, nor deserves. And like the church, he is so frightened of being wrong and losing power that he is willing to put countless lives at risk just in order to appear as if he isn’t wrong.
And so, here we are centuries later slowly sinking back into the same dark abyss of magical thinking, selfish prayer and quack ‘cure-all’ medicines. We are again leaving behind rational observation and thought as we bound head first into cults of personality and brand identity, as if they offer something more substantive than a street gang mentality and some Second Amendment bumper stickers.