Emerging Themes

We're coming to the end of Advent, and with it the end of my self-imposed ban on making political posts on social media. That was more difficult than I expected, but it showed me some interesting things and made me look at my motivations. At the end of Lent last year, I kept up my ban on watching cable news. I don't want to keep up this ban as well, but I do want to do things a bit differently.

The most important thing I have to remember - that we should all remember, actually - is to stay focused. Not posting about politics made me want to read less politics, too. I thought more about what I was really interested in, and less about what was just trying to draw my attention. So much of what goes on is just noise, spewed out there to confuse us or inflame us or keep us from noticing anything else. The last thing I should be doing is adding to it for no good reason.

When I do focus my attention, two major subjects emerge as most important to me. The subject most on my mind, that I want to deal with in the world, is climate change. The subject the world keeps pressing upon me, that it says I must pay attention to, is race. Well, discrimination in general, but it seems like things always come back to race at the root. Everything else - even Donald Trump and his merry band of neo-Confederate, proto-Nazi, Russian-collaborating Republicans - is of secondary importance.

And lastly, when it comes to these two issues, climate change and race, I think the problems we face are too big for us to solve. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the solutions each one needs are bigger and more sweeping than what we human beings are willing to accept, in the amount of time we have before things crash.

I remember an old episode of Quincy, M.E. from the 70s, where Quincy is taking a sabbatical from his Medical Examiner's job and filling in for a small town general practitioner. The doctor he's going to sub for is showing him the ropes when an obviously overweight woman comes in. She steps on the scale, and Quincy starts to exclaim, "Ma'am, you've got to go on a diet!" The other doctor waves him off, and encouragingly tells the woman she lost a whole pound in the last month. Then he looks at Quincy and shrugs. What are they going to do?

That's us. We are the patient. We are the doctors. What are we going to do?

In right-wing circles, there's talk about being in a "United 93 scenario," where the libtards are like terrorists hijacking an airplane, and their only recourse is to rush the cockpit, even if it means the plane ends up crashing. These days, I find myself thinking more about a different United flight, United 232. In that incident, an engine failure crippled the plane, but the pilots were able to crash-land in a spot where emergency crews were ready and waiting, and more than half the people onboard survived. That's us, too. We're on the plane. We're on the emergency crews. How much can we limit the damage that's coming?

I haven't written any blog entries in quite a while, but I might get back to it soon. There's a lot I still need to work through. Much of it I do by myself, on paper, but some of it I want to share. Watch this space.