When I watch the news I often feel like I’m one of those underwater explorers looking out the small window of a bathyscaphe at alien undersea life. The United States that is revealed on the nightly news seems so different from the world that I live in here in rural Southern Appalachia. This may be naïve, but I feel like I live in an island of sanity in a world that has gone crazy.
Let’s take one example. The news is filled with accounts of young men and women in this country being radicalized by Islamic extremism to the point of going to join ISIS or commit homegrown acts of terror in the name of Allah and his Prophet. It is inconceivable to me that a young person’s lot in life could be so bad he or she would believe that joining ISIS represents a better future. I cannot fathom why anyone born in the United States would want to live under an ideology that condones and encourages the barbaric acts that the Islamic State commits: forcing women into sexual slavery, killing children, destroying priceless historic sites and burning, drowning and beheading fellow humans.
I don’t care how grim your situation is in our country, there is no way that any sane person can possibly believe that life in an ISIS-controlled state would be better on any level. I guess the key word in that statement is “sane,” and I’m compelled to conclude that radicalized homegrown terrorists are not rational human beings.
That’s just one example of why I get the feeling that the country that I see every night on the news has gone crazy. There are others:
- A system that tolerates a Congress that exempts itself from the laws and regulations it imposes on the citizenry while voting themselves excessive benefits and privileges;
- Politicians apologizing for saying that all lives matter;
- Men and women in the military having to resort to food stamps and other public welfare to support themselves and their families because their pay is so low;
- A VA system that treats veterans like second class citizens;
- A Federal bureaucracy that has lost the ability to discipline its employees for gross misconduct and misfeasance.Here’s another, smaller example. I read the other day that the United States Department of Agriculture has mounted a campaign to get producers to stop referring to small raisins as midget raisins because the word “midget” is offensive. If you don’t believe me, check out this website.
My first reaction was: Are you shitting me!? First of all, I didn’t know there were such things as midget raisins, and I’m willing to bet that nine-tenths of the American public didn’t either. So if the term is offensive it’s certainly not being bandied about. Second, I question whether most people hearing the term would be truly offended. I certainly didn’t think of small people when I read the term. It’s not like they are called dago raisins or kike raisins or short bus raisins. Regardless of whether a few people subjectively feel that the term “midget raisins” is in some way a slight on their stature, it strikes me as being utterly crazy that taxpayer dollars are being used for such foolishness. Maybe it’s time to bring back Randy Newman’s song about short people.
I could go on and on. (There are a lot of things that piss me off. I might be one of the most pissed off people in the world. It's one of my endearing personality traits.) Note that I have intentionally avoided any examples that smack of politics or political ideology because your yin could be my yang, but I think you get my point. There is so much happening in this country that defies common sense, logic, or explanation.
As I said above, I have this strong sense that I live in an island of sanity in a world that has gone crazy, and it is a great comfort to me to feel like that. I know that many of you will conclude that I’m crazy in believing that. And I freely acknowledge that my feelings in this regard are not very rational and are based in large part on my overly emotional and romantic view of rural small town life.
But that doesn’t matter. In this case perception is more important than reality, at least when it comes to my state of mind. There is such a state of grace as being fat, dumb and happy. What’s important in that phrase is being dumb enough to fail to realize that you shouldn’t be fat or happy.
So I guess the point of this post is that I’m okay with being fat, dumb and happy about living in a rural county near a small town in Southern Appalachia regardless of whether my perceptions are irrational or not.
Maybe the solution to my problem is to stop watching the nightly news. But that would require me to do an “ostrich with its head in the sand” analysis, and that sounds like a lot of mental effort. Screw it—I’m going out to play in the garden.
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