It's Pathetic What's Going on Here

My sister, a dear, generous, and sweet lady writes:

What a mess we have here on our little planet. Rampant corruption, environmental disasters (I cry at what is happening to the Gulf Coast), war, poverty, unemployment, home foreclosures, the rich getting richer at the expense of EVERYONE, and like your blog quoted [yesterday] "being cool to wear tatoos on your neck". This is such a scary time. Are we in self-destruct mode or what? I don't go much for the fundamentalist cry that we are in the end times, but it's pathetic what is going on here. 

Can I disagree? No. How can any thinking person not be feeling something like this? I think we must be approaching some sort of terminal stage of bewilderment, those of us who grew up in that America that seems at least a couple of centuries ago. When the future glowed with fluorescent promise over the horizon. When people had manners, and politeness and courtesy were not  semi-archaic words you had to look up in a dictionary to discover their meaning. Where there was a presumption of honesty, and even if it was misplaced as sometimes it was, it was better than presuming that everyone is dishonest and lying. I confess to being sometimes totally dumbfounded by what's going on around me. More and more I find myself dwelling on thoughts about my kids and my grandkids. What kind of a world will they be living in tomorrow? Can they ever forgive us for what we're leaving them with? Should they?

And so, as I always have done, I turn to music. It seems as constant as oxygen and just as necessary. Always a temporary respite from the roiling in my head. It soothes, and it doesn't lie. There is still some integrity in the process of putting a song together. There's comfort in the harmony it takes for musicians to do their work. And there's beauty in what they produce.

This is a nice little song. The band is called Tulsa (from Boston), and the song is "Breathe Thin." Buy yourself five minutes worth of ear candy and listen. Might take your mind off less pleasant things for a moment. (Sorry I could only find a video with audio only--that sounds weird, doesn't it?)