Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Back on Guilt-Ridden Duty

Believe me, I don't need this frigging guilt about not blogging. I marvel at my blog buds like Montag, who manage to have relatively coherent thoughts several times a day about all kinds of weighty things (and then blog about them) and my daughter who happily blathers on and on about the perfectly mundane at least three times a week. Except she has . . . oh, I don't know . . . is it five blogs and Twitter and Facebook? Or more? Or less? So it's really more than a blog three times a week. A bunch I would judge. Where does her time come from?

While I . . . I cast about my brain for something intelligent to say. It's not as if I don't have thoughts about things, but I'm not at all certain how coherent they are. And they tend often to be . . . shall we say "less than rosy." It's because I'm cursed with this raging contradiction personality. At the personal level I've got a sense of humor, I like to laugh, love baseball, take delight in my grandkids and kids . . . but then there's this other side. The one that's aware of history, that's been framed in a sense of the tragic. The last time my grandson TJ was over we got to talking about the future, and I really didn't have anything cheerful to say about it. Pretty awful to be dumping this kind of crap on an 18-year-old. But I cannot dissemble either. I don't believe things are getting better . . . and it kills me to think what's ahead for my kids and their kids.

The biggest fraud in the world is the politicians of this country, both parties, pretending that things are going to get back to the way they were. We're not going back there. And what they're doing is taking care of themselves and lying to the rest of us. The bastards.

2 comments:

karen lindsey said...

oh tom--i so wish i could disagree with you. i feel like what we did in the 60s and 70s--when we believed or at least seriously hope that we were the beginning of some big change, even if we didn't live to see it---i feel that all of that is being unraveled.

i remember how disillusioned i felt in my mid 20s, like there was nothing we could do against the forces of [to use an always unfashionable word among lefties] evil. the women's movement and the gay movement pulled me back into hope. there are moments i can reclaim that hope--a demo here, a committed leftist and/or feminist kid there. the occupation, which really has fanned out among some people in some places. but the bad guys are so blatantly bad these days, and so rich. they always were but they had some sense that they had to hide it.......

Unknown said...

Karen, do you find yourself wishing that you could just capture something of that hopefulness and sense of possibility you had as a youth? It's impossible. It's as gone as gone can be. There's not a scenario I can conjure up that is realistic that doesn't just scare the bejesus out of me. It's not that I think we're going to tread water. It's that I'm convinced we're all going to sink . . . except of course the plutocrats, who don't inhabit the world we do anyway.