\u201cAnd as the morning light comes streaming in you get up and do it again, amen. \u2013 Jackson Browne<\/p>\n
As we all live our lives it sometimes seems that the radical changes and disruptions in our society that the Left has instituted must overwhelm the system and everything will come apart at the seams forcing us to abandon normalcy once and for all and take up a new existence as 21st century hunter-gatherers living off the released zoo animals and other feral survivors of a better age.\u00a0 As we struggle to survive, the weak will go to the wall.\u00a0 When cannibalism reappears the hopeless, like John Fetterman, will be the first to go in the pot.\u00a0 And he may have his finest hour as soup or stew.<\/p>\n
But what I notice is that despite the almost unending downward spiral of our world, people get up every morning and throw some water on their faces and figure out how to put food on the table and fuel in the oil tank.\u00a0 And somehow, they do it with a laugh and a joke.\u00a0 Now it may be gallows humor for sure.\u00a0 But they still manage to make the joke.<\/p>\n
And they\u2019re right.\u00a0 You can\u2019t get through life no matter how bad things get with your teeth perpetually gritted.\u00a0 You can do it for a while.\u00a0 But if you keep it up too long, you\u2019ll go mad.\u00a0 Sure, when the latest atrocity occurs, you\u2019re got to rail against it and shake your fist and maybe say terrible things about your enemies.\u00a0 And maybe some people finally crack and go berserk.<\/p>\n
But if you\u2019ve got a wife and kids or even if you don\u2019t, somehow you have to make it to Friday and you have to do all the things that get you there.\u00a0 And more than that you have to somehow find some joy in the world.\u00a0 Unless you\u2019re a Dickensian villain like Uriah Heep or Ebenezer Scrooge grinding through your entire life clutching at thorns without a friend in the world is a fate worse than death.\u00a0 Even a man on death row probably talks to the guards sometimes just to break up the monotony.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s something I rediscovered recently.\u00a0 After the 2020 election I was morose to a remarkable extent.\u00a0 Other than family I couldn\u2019t see what was going to keep this world going for me.\u00a0 Disillusionment with our government was total.\u00a0 I had little interest in day-to-day events and the news from Washington was nauseating.\u00a0 And I think this had a deleterious effect on my peace of mind.\u00a0 Apocalyptic thinking was becoming routine.<\/p>\n
But even though things have continued to degrade in our day-to-day life I have had a chance to reflect.\u00a0 Rather than thinking that the world has truly hit some all-time low, what I realize now is that we were formally living in a kind of golden age.\u00a0 And through the foolishness of malicious people, it has been stamped out.\u00a0 And in reality, most of mankind\u2019s existence has been under conditions much, much worse than even this.<\/p>\n
If we\u2019re not as free as we once were, at least no one has branded us and sent us to work in the salt mines.\u00a0 We may not be middle class Americans anymore but we haven\u2019t reached North Korea levels of starvation.\u00a0 We\u2019re no longer proud of our leaders and our government but so far inflation hasn\u2019t reached triple digits.<\/p>\n
We live under a banana republic but so far, I can still make fun of Dementia Joe and the Keystone Gestapo he employs.\u00a0 No one has dragged me off to the gulag yet.\u00a0 And I seem to have rediscovered my sense of humor.<\/p>\n
So yeah, things are bad.\u00a0 As Howard Beale said \u201cWe know things are bad \u2013 worse than bad. They\u2019re crazy.\u201d\u00a0 But when things are crazy you still have to live and maybe you can laugh at the crazy once in a while, even if you laugh while cleaning up the latest result of the crazy.<\/p>\n