“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” – Buddha
I think, for the most part, we live our lives in a state of constant change, making it very difficult to step back, stop the clock, and see where we have come from and where we are. Trust me, I don’t think this is one of those brilliant realizations that gets emboldened and saved for all time, a stroke of brilliance from one of the great thinkers of the 21st century.
Like all of you, I have been rowing my boat in the same sea of lunacy you have. Circumstances have a way of flooding over us, like a rogue wave and all we can think to do is gasp for air, so we are not suffocated, paddling like crazy to just get above the water of now and breathe. You grab for the life jacket and you only think about getting to the shore of “once was all we knew”. We forget where we came from and are consumed with simply not drowning.
A couple of nights ago, I watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Here is a sane guy, trying to outsmart the system by pretending to be nuts and ends up being destroyed by it. You know, it’s easy to think Jack Nicholson is just this old, once famous actor, who used to sit court side for all the Laker’s games, before the insanity of Cuckoo Covid. You know from the outset of the story, the system is going to eat him alive, but his fight is worth the price of admission.
Change occurs in such small increments, making it hard to measure how we got from there to here. Inspired by Ken Kesey’s story, I wondered what would happen if I suddenly awoke in the midst of all we are going through and had the ability of measuring where we were before the craziness smothered us all.
On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump became 45th President of the United States. Like many of you, I was shocked, not only that he won, but that our demented Electoral College system could elect someone, who lost by over 3 million popular votes. We had a taste of it with Gore and Busch, but this election had a touch of insanity about it and boy, was that on the money!
For a bit of surprising ancient context, I looked for Al Gore’s painful concession speech, when he chose to honor the ruling of the Supreme Court. Much to my surprise, he cited Stephen Douglas’ concession speech for the 1860 election. “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.” How far we have fallen in 160 years! I couldn’t help myself and had to throw that in and probably should have waited just a bit, because I want to get back to my Rip Van Winklesque hypothetics.
Being a long time New Yorker and growing up near Trump, on the other side of the tracks, I have been aware of him for a long time. When he started surfacing in the public, I thought he was a clown and an idiot. He was so blatantly narcissistic, it made me laugh. I know he and his Dad were continually sued for discriminating against African Americans in all their rental properties. This was a guy completely enamored with himself. When I woke up, he was running for President.
When I was quite young, I thought JFK walked on water, an incredibly naive sensibility. Those before him and after, always seemed to exude an air of being smaller than the office, feeling the weight of this ongoing experiment. I see this guy and I am appalled at how disrespectful and dishonest he is. He is still a slum lord, lying to his tenants about fixing their toilets. The level of blatant corruption is mind blowing and numbing in its excess.
I swear I am not smart enough to figure out how so many millions of people believe in this charlatan. His spoiled children are running my country and his very own, slum lord, son-in-law is wielding an obscene amount of power. I don’t understand how this is OK. Jack Nicholson was the only one not swallowing the meds and everyone else did. Sometimes, I feel like putting on his black knit cap and telling Nurse Ratchet that it’s not right. Yes, I know I am not alone, but I am often frightened at the behavior of others, because I can’t make sense of it. I feel like telling the Chief to bust a hole in the wall and let me out of here, because everyone is nuts.
I think what disturbs me most of all is not this tyrant with a small penis, rather it is all those people who work with him and for him, who see nothing wrong with any of it. They are toe to toe with Goebbels and Himmler.
The Fourth Estate is pathetic. We are the country with the oldest constitution in the world and our journalists seem to be ashamed of it, bearing silent witness to the hijacking of my America.
Where is the outrage? How could we let this happen and let it keep happening? The Democratic party is scared of its own shadow. Every goddamn statistic indicates that the majority of us want Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, with climate change being at the top of the list. I just read some numbers from the Pew Research Center, indicating that 70% of the people in the top 14 countries, view climate change as their greatest threat. Do you hear Biden championing any of these issues?
I had a quick thought about Stephen Douglas again. He was a brilliant orator. Looking back over the history of this country, there have been so many men and women, who spoke eloquently about America. Inherent in their brilliance was an assumption that their audience was intelligent, too. Today, we are addressed as if we are all idiots and it has dumbed many of us down to a dangerous level of animalistic insensitivity.
I’ll tell you what it feels like. Let’s pretend you are living within a shell of the status quo. Maybe, four or five times a day, there is a gentle peck on that shell. It makes just enough noise to get your attention, but you let it go. Nearly four years later, you have gotten accustomed to this continued disturbance. One day, for no particular reason, one of those repetitive pecks cracks your shell and it falls away, leaving you completely naked to the world. You see it in complete focus and it looks back at you with 20/20.
Well, the sound your hear is me chirping and I am hungry for the truth.
PS: If you have some time, listen to my podcast, Mind and the Motorcycle. It’s on all the platforms. I am getting better at it and chirping more!