Hell in a Handbasket

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I think we're getting to the point where we really can't feel bad about anything for very long, no matter how serious.  Forgive me if I mention below something that you feel I ought to be avoiding.  (Part of the trick to not feeling bad about something is to have people just shut up about it.)

First there was Cancer.  There were bad things before Cancer, but I remember how we grew up hating the word.  Pretty soon, though, it was OK to bring it up in casual conversation, especially after we knew that smoking caused it.  [Not exclusively, of course.]

The Atom Bomb was next.  There was a time when you would get glared at if you mentioned Hiroshima.  But thank god we're allowed to say it now.  I mean, there were concentration camps, and the Israelis still hate Concentration Camp jokes, at least when non-Jews tell them!

What about Communism?  It was a bad word for so long, but of course, the younger generation doesn't exactly know what it is any more.  [It is confused with health care legislation, especially by Baby Boomer fat cats.]  It used to be that little kids were threatened with Fidel Castro.  But it's clear that Cuba is no threat to the US anymore, not as much as Afghanistan, anyway.  And the Afghans don't have bombs.  Yet.

Then came AIDS.  Once AIDS got here, Syphilis and Gonorrhea were not as scary as they had been, though Hepatitis B and some other little things are still delightfully dangerous.  (Did I hear Herpes?)

Pedophilia had a short run, but people were more angry than frightened by the phenomenon.  Pedophiles after all are laughable pathetic figures, unless one happens to hold high office in some church!  Oh dear; let it never be discovered that a Pope was ever a pedophile.

Then there was Vietnam.  How much that word was hated.  But it hasn't been since about 1995.  Either the invention of Windows 95 had a mysterious calming effect, or it was the gulf war, or Vietnam Vets got too old and wise to maintain their indignation.

Though it doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath, there was Exxon Valdez, which caused a lot of indignation in a very small sector of society.  But Exxon went on to become your friendly neighborhood multi-national corporation.  I'm not sure how they pulled it off, but I suspect lowering gas prices had a little to do with it.  The Wildlife, of course, could not vote!  Ha ha!

Then 9/11 came along.  But to the despair of New Yorkers who can still remember that day with horror, the country at large seems to have gotten over it.  We got over it a lot faster than Hiroshima, though, arguably, 9/11 was a far more violent event than the A-Bomb.  So we're getting good at it.  We can forget bad news faster than any generation who ever walked the planet.

Katrina was a mess.  There were lots of Hurricanes before Katrina, but somehow Katrina took everyone by surprise.  George W. Bush was sort of blindsided by it, but he finished his term, and took the bad taste of Katrina with him.  New Orleans folks are still suffering, and many folks in the region are pissed off at the way things were handled, and will be handled in the future, but keeping up that level of anger takes a lot out of us.

Wall Street?  Enron?  Sub prime Mortgages?  Crash 2008?  Well, if you're unemployed, you're obviously angry; the rest of us probably can't quite get up our ire until we're unemployed too.

BP Oil Leak?  Well, everybody cares, certainly.  So what can you do?  Outlaw Oil Leaks?  I bet you the whole thing will be forgotten by Labor Day.

If the Dems had not tried so hard to pass Health Care legislation, there would not have been an oil leak.  I'm sure that is probably the basis of a new religion that's being invented even as we speak.

I have argued for thirty years with friends who insisted that the USA was too big and clumsy to have an honest, efficient government.  It was too much under the thumb of Big Business and The Pentagon [and Trade Unions, and crooked politicians, lazy bureaucrats, beltway bandits, and career unemployed no-goodniks].  It was impossible to make it run efficiently.  This is why, they said, we need to forget about health care reform, and get rid of as many branches of the government as possible, so that taxes will be lowered, and we must each of us look after ourselves.  Small Washington, Big US.  Maybe they have something.  Maybe, if I saved enough on taxes, I COULD PLUG THE OIL LEAK MYSELF.  Now there's a thought.  Huh.

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