I don’t want to turn this into a political debate but watching the Republicans lately (or for that matter, over the past several years) is a lot like seeing a terrible car wreck. You want to turn away. You want to cover your eyes and make believe it’s not happening. You try to think happy thoughts but, oh, the horror of it all, it won’t go away.
So you have to look, just to see if anyone can somehow miraculously climb from the carnage. All the time there’s this gaping pit of sickness pooling in your gut even while a small grain of self-satisfaction appears as you tell yourself that this was inevitable, that for someone driving that recklessly and with so little regard for others on the road this was bound to happen.
You feel bad for the folks in the car just along for the ride but you know that it was their decision to trust this group of questionable characters (yes, I mean this to be plural) to steer their vehicle.
There was no need for this, no need to drive like maniacs and, despite what they claim, they were not forced off the road by a black man in an Escalade. They were just blinded by their own fears.
Unfounded fears.
Think about it, folks, and try to be honest in remembering how things looked in 2008. We were looking at the collapse of our stock markets and our housing markets while unemployment had skyrocketed in the prior years. Lives were in disarray. Do you believe that things are as bad after the past seven years as these reckless drivers claim? The only thing keeping us from realizing how close we are to some form of prosperity is this promoted and irrational fear.
That’s what Warren Buffett believes and I tend to agree with him. As he said in his 2015 letter to his stockholders in which he makes a compelling and detailed argument (please read it) against this overstated fear that we are on the brink of disaster: while it would be irrational to be excessively optimistic all the time, it’s useful to remember that the greatest deterrent … remains their excessive focus not on what can go right in the future, but on what might go wrong.
Get that? Focus on what can go right, not only on what can go wrong.
Before you go crazy and point out how awful the world is in your eyes, let me point out that I understand that things are not perfect right now. The point is that no time has ever been perfect and none ever will. That is simply the nature of life, especially life in a large and constantly evolving country that has interests all over the world. It’s a shifting puzzle that looks different from day to day. But if you are always told and believe it’s going to look bad, it will look bad.
But some will always see the end of the world coming in the present and some will try to benefit from this. They’re going to want to drive the car, say they know a quicker route and that if you don’t let them at that wheel now you’re all going to die soon.
But give it some thought and trust your own mind, people. The sky is not on fire and the four horsemen are not scourging the land yet. Take the wheel and go with the flow…
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The painting at the top is an old piece from about 20 years back that I call The Angst.
I have always been a big fan of the movies. I’ve written here in the past how I will often paint while an old movie plays in the studio, especially some of the older classics that were often based on great ideas and great dialogue. They are not distracting in most cases and it’s easy to pull thought and emotion from these films that finds its way into my work. It’s hard to not want to inject more feeling into whatever I am at work on when I listen to some of the lines from The Grapes of Wrath or so many other great films.
I was going through some old images the other day and for some reason I always settle on this image shown here, an old piece from my earliest painting efforts over twenty years back. I call it The Incantation. At that moment a news station was on the TV, with its incessant and seemingly never-ending coverage of the presidential primaries.
Aww, change the channel. It’s a rerun…
I am going to change the channel now. It’s time for Sunday music and I’ve been singing this song all week. It’s the Tom Jones version of Elvis Presley Blues which was written and performed originally by Gillian Welch. I am a big fan of Gillian Welch and love her version but I really admire Tom Jones’ take on it as well. It’s pared down accompaniment really highlights the power of his voice which is still formidable even at age 75.
There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.
Fear sometimes produces acts of courage and honor. Unfortunately, more often than not it brings out the worst in people, producing acts of shameful stupidity that stand out in history. Watching the many US state governors over the last couple of days, all spouting about how they will not allow Syrian refugees into their states ( even though they don’t have the power to do so) brought this thought to mind. NJ guv Chris Christie even went so far as saying he wouldn’t accept a 3 year old Syrian orphan. Classy move for a classy guy.
And not just down the street. There were about 700 camps located in every state but a few and most allowed the POWs to be hired as workers in all fields except those that dealt directly with the war effort. They were out and about in many communities. It is reported that great deal of the slack caused by a shortage of manpower lost to the war was taken up by POWs, especially in the field of agriculture.
I just don’t know.
Redtree Times 