When will I ever learn?

After I dipped my toe into the current political discussion Monday morning, by noon I wished I had not.

I have previously resolved not to involve myself in such nonsense, instead trying to emulate my old pal Paul, who wrote, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

There is nothing true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy about politics and government, and yet every so often I forget myself and write about it anyway.

As I wrote to a friend on Facebook after a small kerfuffle, “I do usually regret leaping into the fray. More than 50 years after Pete Townshend put it so succinctly — ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ — most people still don’t get it. I should chalk that up to ‘things I cannot change’ and concentrate on the important stuff.”

A very dear friend from my ancient past wrote, “funny that your perception of reality is so totally different than mine.”

“I agree. It’s the most interesting thing about these present times,” I responded.

And so, except when I forget my resolution, I write in this space about love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I try not to be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. That’s probably one of the reasons why the analytics say my audience rarely rises about two or three dozen readers. Noise sells.

That won’t stop me from sitting quietly in my old blue chair, a golden retriever snout against my foot, seeking a still, small voice that calls me to add beauty to this nutty world, not more discord.

I apologize for the misstep.

Where we were and where I was

Listen to this post:

That was a surprise.

Frankly, I didn’t want to join the chorus commemorating the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. of A. on this date back in 2001. I was an editor for the late lamented Green Bay News-Chronicle that day, and I have my share of memories, as do all of us who lived through that day. This weekend brings the 25th anniversary of my first prescription for high blood pressure, a condition we discovered after I got worried about the chest pains I experienced while working on the Sept. 13 edition of the News-Chronicle. We had produced an Extra on Tuesday afternoon, the regular Wednesday morning paper, and it was time to consider what was going into Thursday’s paper when my internal alarms went off.

I have very strong opinions about the difference between the U.S. of A. of 2001 and where it stands today, and very mixed opinions about whether I want to go there in this space, and so I decided to peruse the archives to see what I was writing around the 20th anniversary back in 2021.

Surprise! Not a whisper. Instead I was focused on finishing a novel that I had been tinkering with for two or three years already. Enough was enough, and so I set myself a deadline to see if — after decades of meeting deadlines successfully in my news-gathering career — it would help to set a deadline in my novel writing. Spoiler alert: The novel is still not finished. Mind you, I have finished seven other books in the meantime, just not that one.

We also were focused on the newest member of our little clan. Summer had been born around July 20, we picked her out on Aug. 29, and she met Dejah and our cat Blackberry on Sept. 11. Those were sweet times.

The closest I came to addressing the historic date was three days later, and then it was only as I promoted a new edition of my first book of essays from 2010, Refuse to be Afraid. I concluded, “These are scary people who want us to be terrified. We used to call people like that terrorists; I still do … We need to overcome the fear and live in freedom. Otherwise, the terrorists have won.”

And I would add that it’s essential to love God and love our neighbors, remembering that we are 8 billion or so neighbors sharing this little orb in space.

How AI is affecting America’s mental health crisis

Listen to this post:

The headline was “How AI is affecting America’s mental health crisis.” Wait, America has a mental health crisis? When did that happen? Where did it begin? Holy cow! How are we going to handle all of these crises at the same time?!?

If we are to believe the politicians and town criers, we have been in a constant state of crisis all our lives, all of it caused by an endless series of hobgoblins from which only they can save us.

And yet somehow we seem to muddle along day by day.

I shall now employ a writer’s cliche: turning to the dictionary definition. According to the American Heritage online dictionary, a crisis is “a crucial or decisive point or situation, especially a difficult or unstable situation involving an impending change.”

In other words, nearly every day we face a crucial turning point as we navigate a “difficult or unstable situation” and a potentially horrifying change that could happen any day now.

And yet, to quote the prophet Tom Petty, as I love to do, “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.” So — was it really a crisis or one of H.L. Mencken’s imaginary hobgoblins, again to cite another of my favorite quotes?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. (I will trust you to look up the definition of “rhetorical question” on your own.) Things may be alarming in the Menckien sense, but we are not in crisis. We do not need the politicians and town criers to save us; they just say that to get the votes and clicks they need to carry on — vultures feasting on carrion (see what I did there?).

By the way, I did not depend on AI to write this little screed. The built-in AI wanted to finish my words and sentences for me — and I’m driving it crazy by not changing the spelling of the word “Menckien,” which I believe I may have just made up.

Hey, as long as someone (or AI) has already determined that it’s effective clickbait, why don’t I steal the headline for today’s blog? And speaking of clickbait, here’s an adorable photo of Summer as a puppy. If this post goes viral, we can blame it on artificial intelligence, the other party, and our plague of ongoing crises.