Dreamer's World January 19 2017 - A Difficult Time To Write

      This is a difficult writing task for me. I am home with Hal as he prepares spaghetti for my birthday, which is tomorrow. I face the fact that I will be 53 years old tomorrow, but that isn’t what is bothering me right now. I am filled with trepidation over what the future holds after tomorrow.

      I always try to be optimistic in my outlook on life, but right now I cannot seem to find that strength. The country that I love will be handed over to a madman and there is nothing that can stop it from happening. Why does this have to happen on my birthday? I am fearful about what might happen, if not from the madman himself, then from his even more insane followers. I have never seen such hatred in my life. While the ugly instincts that the madman has awakened have always lurked just beneath the surface in our society, now they are boiling over.

      The hatred that President Obama faced was laced with resentment because Obama was the President and the sad, bitter people were filled with hatred over that fact. Today, on the verge of their takeover of this nation, they seem to be even angrer than ever, and already drunk with power that they cannot wait to unleash on everyone who has disagreed with them.

      I cannot imagine living with such hatred of someone else. It is toxic and will eventually consume them just as easily as they will use it to try and harm others first. They are convinced that they are right, and this has always made them dangerous because they will invoke their so-called god to make everything they will attempt to do seem justifiable.

      Oscar Wilde said “Patriotism is the Virtue of the Vicious” and he was right. I might be quoting someone else, but I also believe that Religion is the Cleanser that washes away the sins commited in its name. There are very few things more dangerous than people who are convinced that they have “god” on their side because it frees them from the responsibility of behaving like civilized human beings and allows them to commit atrocities and harm others.

This is the cause of my trepidation and it unsettles me greatly. We will find out just how civilized we truly are in the coming months, and the uncertainty about the results alarms me. I wish that I was more confident about the future as I mark the end of another year in  my own life. Hopefully I will be wrong in the sense that we will not let things go to hell in a handbasket, but the hatred that I see and hear doesn’t fill me with confidence right now.

The only thing that I can do is to focus on the here and now, on Hal and The Stooges, on protecting us from the approaching storm and making sure that we are safe. I suppose that is true of everyone right now, but the sadness I feel on this birthday is unlike any I have felt before. Let’s be careful out there.