The Times We Live In

This decade in our nation's history has not exactly been one to inspire my confidence in its future.  The COVID-19 pandemic was one of those crises that hit us from time to time, testing the resolve of our people to confront it. Sad to say, in much of the country it was a failed effort, with folks flipping out over the notion of simply wearing a mask around others and refusing to accept freely given, safe and potentially life-saving vaccines.  Then there was the 2020 presidential election, when a sitting president, for the first time in United States history, adamantly refused to acknowledge the results of his defeat and encouraged a violent insurrection against Congress to prevent the electoral votes from being officially counted.  Worse, two thirds of his party in the House of Representatives...including its current Speaker...supported overturning a free and fair election, and a majority of Americans polled in the same party agreed that the losing incumbent president, who recently said he wants to institute firing squads, guillotines and mass executions, should have stayed in office.  Rabble-pandering politicians like my own state's governor are tripping over each other in a race to see who can seem the most reactionary and intolerant with their edicts and laws.  Mass shootings claiming innocent lives have become commonplace in America...but don't offend the gun-worshippers by suggesting any meaningful firearms regulation laws. And now, for nearly a year in running, another fascist leader...this one in Russia...is threatening nuclear war as his military seems hopelessly bogged down in neighboring Ukraine, a country that, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, gave up its own nuclear weapons in exchange for an assurance that Russia would never invade it.  So, these are the times we live in...can't wait to see what happens next...