Change is Gonna Come

Because it always has

As good as I feel personally and despite all of the optimism I have for the future, I have a large number of progressive, lifelong Democrats in my circle and their confusion and worry disconcerts me. Their feelings are understandable. The man they have been repeatedly told and come to believe is “just like Hitler” and who would mark the end of Democracy, is proving those claims to be false--unless one believes that Hitler’s mission was to dismantle government powers, transparency in all things, and that the greatest threat to Democracy is allowing the citizens to discover what has been done with their money and in their name. It must feel, to my progressive friends, like being presented a jigsaw puzzle in which none of the pieces match up.

The man who supposedly hates women, immigrants of all stripes, and people of color nominated a first-generation Indian to head the FBI, a first-generation Cuban as Secretary of State, a woman as Attorney General, a black man to head Housing and Urban Development, a woman as Director of National Intelligence, and on and on. It’s what the progressives would normally call a “diverse” cabinet, but in the last few decades “diverse” has come to mean “Looks different but is at heart a dyed-in-the-wool progressive”. Anything less was believed to be some sort of Uncle Tom working against the interest of the people. This is just intellectual gymnastics.

Individuals who I know to be very, very smart see the stories about the fiscal corruption of USAID and their takeaway is to worry that NPR might soon be defunded. They are willing to immediately forget and forgive the propaganda campaigns we just lived through—Hunter’s laptop, Biden’s mental acuity, the Russian Collusion Hoax, the “fine people” hoax, and the mother-of-all-hoaxes, the Covid hysteria.

“I no longer recognize my country,” they mournfully say.

“Yeah,” I think, “welcome to my last three decades.”

My gut reaction is to laugh and be angry, to lash out and rub their noses in the rank hypocrisy. “If your money was going to Pro-Life groups, GOP fronts, and the National Review you’d see the problem immediately!” But I leave these things unsaid. It’s a new world and the Potemkin Villages are coming down. They will face reality, or not, without my weighing in. What will the landscape look like without one narrative or another being propped up by a global network funded by USAID? We’re about to find out. Expect a seismic shift in the real estate market of Loudon County, VA.

The sad thing about this is it didn’t have to happen. When Trump was elected in 2016, the Democrats could have just played by the rules and let the chips fall, but already there was too much invested, too much ready money and easy careers in play, so measures had to be taken. The government agencies were weaponized against Trump (the countless investigations and show trials and impeachments that would never, ever have come to someone who was willing to play ball with the status quo), but also against parents who spoke out against Woke in their schools, protesters who oppose unlimited abortion on demand, and individuals who refused to toe the line, whether online or in the media. Efforts to instill identity politics into academia, our culture, and the world were redoubled. From where I sit it appeared a veritable blizzard of bullshit, an overwhelming tsunami of propaganda that would never recede.

So I understand. Many people faced with the choice between questioning what they were being told or buying in and accepting the package (from climate change to critical theory in all things), understanding in their gut that to question the package would mean being labeled (libeled?) as a racist, misogynist, and Nazi sympathizer by the side that seemed to hold all of the cards chose to go along to get along. Who wants to be called a Nazi? Who wants to be hated for opinions they do not hold?

Trust me on this. It isn’t comfortable.

The “right side of history” team has lost the election and control, and now the dissonance will set in. We were all lied to. We paid to have the Wuhan Virus created, and then we paid to be lied to about the origin, the dangers, and the vaccines. We know this now. We were lied to about Trump colluding with the Russians. We were lied to about every impeachment. We paid for George Soros to infect out judiciary with feckless DAs. We paid for critical theory, as gender fluidity or racial theory, to be inculcated all over the globe. We paid for fake research, bad medicine, rewritten history and propaganda. We paid for prosecutors to turn a blind eye here and focus there for purely political reasons. We paid the 5^th Estate to carry the lies to us! All of this was done to us and in our name with our own money. Holy smoke! What a shitshow.

That is going to hurt my progressive friends when it eventually sinks in. It will feel like being the guy who lost his mortgage payment in a game of Three Card Monte. How could I have been so stupid? Let me never think of this again.

If, to forestall and delay this reckoning some of my friends need to pretend that there is an all-out attack on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me and Fresh Air, and that is all that there is, I can be patient, tolerant, and silent. Reality always shows up. Eventually, it sweeps everything away.

Facts are stubborn things and as Ben Shapiro likes to say, they do not care about our feelings. Maybe this will be the hardest truth to swallow.

The universe does not care if our feelings are bruised or if we are afraid, any more than it does if I’m concerned about getting old or the tread on my tires. The universe shouldn’t care. In the coming weeks and months a whole lot of very uncomfortable facts are going to come to light and a goodly number of sacred cows are going to be gored, and for many this will feel like the nation, everything they believed to be true, is burning down around their heads. I don’t care about their feelings.

I can be supportive and sympathetic, but the truth always wins out in the end. I can’t protect anyone from that. Too many lies have been told already.

*

Marianne Faithful passed away last week at the age of 78. She was a player in the music world for a few decades. In 60s she had a relationship with Mick Jagger and they ruled the London party scene, but by the 70s she and Jagger had split and she was living on the streets of SoHo, addicted to heroin. Her life from there was a series of ups and downs.

I was first introduced to her by her 1979 album Broken English and her interpretation of John Lennon’s Workingclass Hero. I preferred (and still prefer) her version to Lennon’s.

It was sad that her passing wasn’t noted more. It was just a blip on the news radar. To me, she is a testament to the human spirit. No matter how broken someone seems to be, she reminds me, there is a spark of magic still in there. Again and again she demonstrated this, falling to despairing lows and then, again, returning to the studio. Not everything was great, but at her best she was very good indeed and she deserves to be remembered. She was the real deal. Listen:

*

1st world problems.

Have you seen the cost of bird seed? I remember “bird seed” being the euphemism for very cheap. “Don’t worry about it! It’s bird seed!”

Today, keeping two regular bird feeders full enough to prevent the birds from forgetting where they are costs about $50/week.

So I argue with myself.

“Why bother. They’re wild birds. They were here before the feeders showed up and they’ll still be here when you’re in the ground and the feeders long forgotten.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but I really like watching them and I feel badly when the feeders are empty.”

“Why? The birds don’t know they are feeders. They just know it’s a place where there is something to eat sometimes.”

“True,” I say, “but it’s like hanging them up was making a promise. Failing to fill them feels like being a disappointment. I put them up and made the promise of food. Not filling them is reneging on that promise.”

“So take them down.”

“No,” I say. “I like seeing the birds there in the morning.”

“Idiot. It’s $200 a month. You live in the friggen woods. Birds will still be here.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but I like seeing them at my feeders, right outside of the window, where I can see them from my desk.”

“Then shut up about it. Idiot.”

“Okay,” I say.

Everything is going to be okay. Take care of what you can take care of—the people around you, yourself, the birds.

Peace.