2020

“My optimistic nature is conspiring with my impatience with mean-spirited people, assisted by my oldest vice, laziness, to make me a political hermit at the exact time when the people and country I love need me to be engaged…”

…or so goes the chastisement I give myself every day.

I know I’m not the only person who’s feeling this, and I admit that at times it’s overwhelming: It leads to both political inaction and the inability to focus on anything else. But where exactly do you begin, except by refusing to tune in? What can you  say that’s constructive when so much untruth is is in the air?

For most of 2017, ’18, and ’19 I let it go, but the arrival of 2020 feels like something’s gotta give, not in the nation, in my personal abstention.

It has been obvious for some time that the guy who finished second in 2016 has a nose for when to say something outrageous to change the conversation whenever it’s not going his way. Assassinating Suleimani the week his own impeachment was getting real was something we could have predicted, based on past behavior. And then to publish this for his 70 million Twitter followers:

10 months before the election. What will 10 days before bring us?

Where do you begin? Two minutes after he announced he was a candidate for president in 2015, he accused Mexico of sending “rapists” to the United States, and today the national conversation hasn’t gotten past the question, “Is he racist?”

And the Left seems consumed by bogus questions like “Is Bernie Sanders sexist?” or “Is Elizabeth Warren an elitist?” I emphasize seems because all is obviously not what it seems in public anymore, and the conversation has been kept alive all this time by those among us who, let’s just say, seem to relish the fight.

As I noted above, I am optimistic by nature. I think there are millions of us who haven’t been engaged so far – except for Election Day, 2018, and that was a good day for us. As the days get longer, we’ll be coming down from the hills.

I predict that 2020, among other milestones, will be an explosive year for art, poetry, film, and music.

Then, as the days get shorter, we’ll be engaged. There will be a whole lot of disinformation, frayed feelings, and strange bedfellows. More action, and less and less of the pale cast of thought.