I’m Tired. Man, I’m Tired. I’m So-o-o Tired…

I mean I’m usually tired in August anyway, what with the crippling heat here in Texas, but I’m also weary of the cultural roller coaster ride we’ve had to endure over the last few news cycles. Not so much because of any personal involvement, you understand, but because of the bombardment of personal opinions and propaganda and virtue-signaling and ‘explanations’ that don’t explain anything and imply that anyone who has any other opinion is ignorant or biased, unlike ‘clever people like me, who talk loudly in restaurants.’

In fact, I used to have opinions not dissimilar to the ones they hold. When I was young and hadn’t thought about them much. They sounded good and kind. But as Jules Claretie (or was it Anselme Polycarp Batbie? Or Edmund Burke? It almost definitely did on originate with Winston Churchill) “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative by 35, you have no head.” I have had to constantly revise my positions (often to my own detriment) as my old stances one by one failed the tests of logic and benevolence to the other.

What am I to do? Stand by silently and let basically kind, generous people go careening down pathways of destruction, not only for themselves but for many others? Sit quietly while what I am convinced is the truth gets insulted? I am not really a political person. I am often asked (like many others) “Why do you care so much (about this or that issue)? Why can’t you let people go quietly to the devil their own way?” The only answer I have is that I do care about the truth, and I do care about the ultimate well-being of other people, even when they are choosing their own road to ruin or choosing it for others. And if they are allowed to preach their own viewpoints, then so am I.

I have come to my conclusions after sixty years of hard thinking, not by following popular trends. I don’t intend to stop thinking now. It is tiring at my age to have to sum up why I think what I think, especially in snappy bits that will hold the attention of the modern media consumer. I don’t want to (indolence is one of my besetting sins) but I feel I might be obliged to by a little stricture called the Golden Rule. But it makes me weary.