stop that!!!!

I don't even care if this is Photoshopped

Increasingly of late, there is a catcall from the back of my auditorium. It has a helpless, angry, confused tenor that hardly cares that it cannot cite chapter and verse to support its volume. The catcall is self-involved and is sick of being reasonable and balanced and thoughtful. It goes ....

"Why is everything so fucked up?!"

Sure, it has elements of a president who is a pinhead and cannot enunciate or get behind a single policy for my country: Whatever succeeds, he claims; whatever fails, he blames on someone else. The distortions and lies are catching, despite the fact that I got my annual flu shot the other day.

But it's not just the idiocy at the top. There is a topsy-turvy cast to a world full of 'interconnectedness.' Blame the internet? Get real... or at least real-er... or something!

A mass shooting in Las Vegas is just today's top-dollop of instability. A Puerto Rico reeling from a recent hurricane (cum presidential commentary) and a Texas community (Houston) still sweeping and shoveling out after a hurricane of its own. Catalonia at loggerheads over its independence vote with Spain. A sixteen-year-old war in Afghanistan for which no one can muster an end-game scenario. Somewhere lurking is the PR war between the US and North Korea (Kim Jong-un is the sane one in that ring). And in Cuba, a mystery remains unsolved as personnel at the US embassy are afflicted with ... well, no one knows quite what it is, but personnel are being siphoned out.

I try to sweep up the shards and splinters of the fucked-uppedness, but the bits and pieces can't seem to circumscribe a comprehensible whole... and I am left with the Trump supporters wondering, "Doesn't anyone give a shit?"

Which, of course, they do, I suppose. Living in god's armpit is dispiriting.

I suppose that others, like me, feel like the parent at the playground who sees a brewing problem and dons a top-sergeant's demeanor:

STOP THAT!!!!!!

But where you're the parent and I'm the parent and we both say "stop it" but mean different things...?

Don't hold your breath.

Shoot somebody.

I don't mean that ... sort of.