On The Day Trump Nixed His Staff from the Correspondents Dinner

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Sitting here I am at the dinning room table. Good beautiful light outside now  but it is the tail end of what has been a cloudy chilly day.  Have been running through my list of all time favorites songs to play.  Funny that, almost all of the tunes are songs of loss and hoped for, but most likely failed redemption.  This was the stuff I was listening to in my early teens and through college.  

Mission in the Rain by Jerry Garcia is a prime example.  A loser adrift Garcia's worn voice sells it. Well then there's Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death, not much there in the way of redemption there, eh?  Mostly I listened to ballads.  It is amazing I made it to adulthood listening to Ralph McTell’s Streets of London.

Back in those years I was an optimistic secular humanist.  Yeah, let us break that down.  What is an optimist? Well one perspective is that you are a person who is hopeful and confident about the future.  If you get a little more rarefied, it is a philosophy wherein you believe that this world is the best of all possible worlds or that good must ultimately prevail over evil. Yeah, this kind of dovetails with the secular humanist definition.  Secular humanism  is a belief that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God.

Ah optimism, ah youth, to recapture one or the other, wouldn’t that be something? As the years have passed I have lost faith in so very much of humanity.  I have become convinced that with the accumulation of possessions and wealth that we lose our capacity to be generous. With each step up the rung of winning we lose sight of those they have not reached the same level. Humans become possessive, protective, aggressive and instransigent.

It does not mean that I am going to quit trying to do justice.  It does not mean that I am going to abandon my hope that without God we can be moral.  I mean my hope in listening to those songs was that somehow, somewhere, some way there was going to be redemption.  What I feel now is that it is harder each day to fight the growing ugliness and hatred I see, a palpable dark knife wound that is forming a chasm between people.

I didn’t mean to end up here tonight.  What was really on mind was loss and loneliness. But our world has become so polluted with hatred and anger we cannot easily find our way to reflect on individual pain, on love, on loss. My heart is sick and broken.  The hearts of people I love are sick and broken. The road here has been so fast, not so wide, but oh so very fast.  

Why is it that the good all just seems to come undone?  Why is it that we cannot find a commanilty to lift out of this foul mess that is sucking us in? Was I wrong to believe that humanity could move forward without the threat of hellish punishment or the promise of crowns of gold and jewels and robes of purest white? 

I keep coming back to the definition of optimism. No matter how worn my heart feels I believe we can make it better.