You may have noticed. No matter how bad things get, the world keeps turning. A day doesn’t pass without impending doom. Greece, Italy and Spain are hopelessly insolvent, but a funny thing happened on their way to ruination — their soccer teams and soccer fans forgot to take notice. Terrorists kill people willy-nilly, starvation crushes millions and governments commit genocide; yet blood running in the streets doesn’t stop their Olympic athletes from running marathons in London. In America, a President tells lies routinely and unashamedly; an Attorney General perjures himself under oath and The Constitution languishes, gravely injured, while a nation preoccupied with social media has a jolly old time playing every game under the sun. This is just the way it is. You might as well face facts. Sure, you want to see the preservation of ideals that birthed an exceptional nation; you want to see things like morality, ethics, honor and character ingrained in every member of Congress — but that’s a pipe dream. Those attributes are MIA, increasingly replaced by wickedness, duplicity, corruption and disgrace. You want to see Mankind somehow come to its senses after centuries of tyranny, but then you remember even Jesus left the authority of Rome to the Romans. They nailed him up and the world kept right on turning under the depraved rule of evil men. Since that most dreadful day, in case you hadn’t noticed, nothing changed the misery index of the common man until a handful of uncommon men risked everything a mere 236 years ago to establish a nation of the people, by the people and for the people. Now, the work of these giants rests in the hands of midgets elected by an uneducated and uncultured mob, and you have no plausible reason to believe that mob will shrink. This is just the way it is. Get used to it; and as Andy Dufresne said on his way out of Shawshank, “Get busy livin’.” Get in your little red wagon and escape. Find your own games to play. Chill. And when you need a good laugh, visualize your pet fantasy — Jefferson and Madison sitting across a table from BO and Biden. Giants and midgets. What a treat that would be. What a great birthday gift on this July 4, 2012.
