Search Results for: I Saw An Angel Last Night

Last night, at President Trump’s disastrous rally in Tulsa, the future of politics met the past. It was a rout. The past went squealing off like a dog who lost a fight.

Thousands of teenagers came out of nowhere to take down an unsuspecting President on the day of his big moment. The stakes were pretty high. Wait until he figures out what a bunch of teens on a social media platform did to him.

A Trump supporter in Tulsa told one reporter that the President’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he first saw those empty seats.

He was trolled by teenagers and a grandmother on a web site that many adults in America have never heard of, but which is changing the way we think and talk to one another.

Working in secret and on alternative websites, they sprung a trap that got the President of the United States to overpromise and underdeliver in front of an attentive but exhausted nation.

We are only just learning how President Trump and his followers were humiliated by some teens on the joyously creative Web phenomenon TikTok, home to estimated 500,000 people, most of them very young and with a new kind of consciousness.

(A Tulsa city official said Sunday that only 6,200 people attended his rally, about one-third of the arena’s total capacity.)

I should mention that I am a member of TikTok.

It’s one of the most creative sites I’ve seen. It’s full of fun and originality; it’s where I am studying the new and wildly popular form of a short video that is the new language of communications for so many teenagers and even some older people like me.

As a subscriber to TikTok, I was not aware that hundreds of thousands of teenaged TikTok subscribers quietly and under the radar of adults and politicians launched a “no show” protest of President Trump’s rally more than a week ago.

Last March, the New York Times referred to Tik Tok as the revolutionary new website that is “Rewriting the World.” That’s when I first started looking at it and got hooked.

They were prescient, TikTok also began rewriting political history last night.

It seems more and more likely that they contributed to the low turnout by reserving tickets – hundreds of thousands of tickets – to an event they never planned to attend.

It is not clear if the Tik-Tok “no show” protest was entirely responsible for the low turnout – people without tickets were supposed to come in enormous numbers also.

And there were lots of good reasons not to attend Trump’s rally Saturday. It seems his supporters are smarter than he is.

But it now seems almost certain that the people on Tik-Tok were very much a factor in setting up the first time President Trump every saw an empty seat at his rally.

He didn’t like it and broke some new records lying and blaming other people – radicals, the media, “thugs” –  for the empty seats.

The irony is that it wasn’t a teenager who inspired this tech-protest. It was a grandmother named Mary Jo Laupp, who suggested in a video that TikTok members launch a “no-show” protest against Trump by going online to reserve tickets to the rally, then to make a point out of not showing up.

The idea spread through the site like wildfire. K-pops followers jumped in.

The video went viral, and not only on Tik-Tok. The tech-savvy teens of America – notoriously disinterested in Old Fart politics –  struck one of the most damaging blows yet against the President and his aggressive style of campaign.

All over this alternative social media alliance, the world spread virally to make the calls and send the messages that would reserve tickets to the rally. Trump’s campaign staff saw the calls coming in got dizzy, then greedy. They start bragging.

They believed their own hype and denial about the problems facing the President.

A bunch of visually gifted kids completely outgunned the campaign, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and specializes in ruthless and usually baseless assaults on opponents.

The fake reservations caused Trump and his campaign aides to boast that a million people were trying to order tickets online. “We’ve never had an empty seat,” Trump said at the White House.

Hundreds of thousands, they said, would come to Tulsa, even if they couldn’t get into the rally itself.

Trump was so excited that his campaign set up a new arena space and field to handle what they promised the country would be at least 40,000 people who couldn’t get into the main rally venue. He would go outside to talk to them.

Meanwhile, the Tik Top scheme launched by Laupp (she worked on Pete Buttigieg’s political campaign) was gaining followers.

TikTok users teamed up with fans of Korean pop music groups and claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for President Trump’s campaign rally as a prank.

On June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing “no show protest” information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally- and then not show up.

The trend spread quickly to TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same.

“It spread mostly through Alt.TikTok – we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” You Tuber Elijah Daniel, 26, told the New York Times.

It was interesting that K-pop Twitter and Alt. TikTok formed a new kind of social media alliance for political reasons.

If you want to understand the future of politics, you  might want to think about the implications of that.

It worked brilliantly this time; it will surely be tried again.

The teenagers not only ruined the President’s big and much-ballyhooed campaign kickoff, but they also showed up the Democratic Party and the legions of so-called traumatized “progressives.”

Trump’s opponents have been outboxed from the beginning, signing petitions, pleading for money, and writing impassioned and alarming posts on social media for four years.

The Tik-Tokers made a lot of people look old and ineffective, including our tired, long, and expensive campaign culture.

These kids did Trump more damage in one day than Trump’s many opponents and enemies have done in four years.

Trump has made a point of ridiculing and defaming the young as lazy, radical, and destructive. He has made no effort of any kind to reach out to young people or learn about their culture. He dumps on the culture of the young whenever he can.

I’m guessing he will start paying attention now.

Because young people are high up on the list of voters who dislike him, and TikTok showed us that when they get their shit together, they can do awesome things.

More than any other demographic they use tech and understand the tech-enabled culture better than anyone, they know how to use it.

Social media and the Internet is becoming more and more entrenched in the lives and work and commerce and culture – and politics – of Americans. TikTok’s “prank” whose us why it’s so essential this culture is recognized and understood, rather than lamented and criticized.

This new alliance between Alt.TikTok and J-Pop’s members also showed us just how out of touch with the future Trumpism is. Nobody believed a million people were seeking those tickets. Why did they?

They never saw it coming. I didn’t either, but then, I’m not running for President. Trump has always reveled in championing the past, but to me, his supporters at the rally just seemed tired and bewildered.

Money can buy lots of fancy equipment, but it can’t acquire the skills or energy you see on TikTok every day.

The relevant political issue is this: the country is changing radically and rapidly, kids have the tools of change firmly in hand.

If you don’t have the kids, you don’t have the future. And you soon enough may not even have the tools to campaign effectively for public office.

I’ve never seen or heard of teenagers organizing like this. Know it or not, they are seizing the future from the grumpy and mostly clueless old white men fighting so hard to turn the block back.

I keep saying it’s pointless to simply hate Trump and whining about what’s happening to our country. At some point, people have to go and do something.

The kids on  TikTok have done that. And wow. What a lesson, and in so many ways, a window into tomorrow.

Trump and his campaign introduced the idea of trolls harassing critics and political opponents and polluting social media with hate messages before and after the election in 2016.

Now, the newly politicized kids on TikTok (I love TikTok, it’s one of the most creative sites every on the Web, I’m about to put up some videos of the animals and life here, TikTok style) have tasted their Wheaties.

The Trump campaign will be fending them off all year.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good,” Steve Jobs said of technological innovation, “then you should go, do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

That seems to me to be the ethos of the kids on TikTok. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Tulsa left me hopeful that so many teenagers are taking the time to craft a new kind of political protest, just as Trump did with his trolling army and rallies in 2016. and afterward.

TikTok is about humor, irony, and innovation, qualities that do not exist in the Trump campaign or the President’s soul. We have not heard the last of them.

President Trump’s monster – the use of the Internet to disrupt and troll –  has turned on him, as monsters are wont to do.

This is a big deal for politics and the future of our country.

If  TikTok is tomorrow, Trump and his rallies are yesterday. The rally last night one last night seemed like a charade to me,  hollow and out of date.

I could almost recite Trump’s speech verbatim as he gave it, only I couldn’t handle watching it for two hours.

Truth is essential to me; it has gone off to hide but shows some signs of returning, crawling out of its cave.

Nothing Donald Trump said was new. None of it was exciting, not even the entirely predictable roars, it feels so much like a cult now, not a political campaign.

I felt sorry for people who would risk their health and possibly their lives for absolutely no reason at all. It suggests to me they think they are worthless. I am glad some of his followers valued their lives more than his ego and stayed home.

For Trump’s MAGA people, Tulsa was the 2020 version of drinking that Kool-Aid.

Again and again, I had this thought today: it’s time to consider life after Trump. The future is lapping at our shores.

Saturday night, I sat up and thought about what I had seen. TikTok kept going through my head, that was the big story of the night. Davids had slain the Goliath.

I have never seen hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young kids using new social media to affect politics in this way. That is a transformative thing.

TikTok’s Blitzkrieg not only deflated the crowd in the arena, but it also fooled the Trump campaign into looking ridiculous and clueless.

When only 30 people showed up for the second rally outside, the “overflow,” crowd,  it was hurriedly canceled.

The future is here, and we all can jump on the train or jump off. I’m in.

The post-Trump world will not be a paradise. It’s time to think about it. It will take a lot of hard work and many years to get things straight again. There are no magic wands for sale, even on the Internet.

Whoever follows Trump will lead a divided and discouraged nation in the grip of a Pandemic that our government will have denied and ignored for a year, and a government out of money in a country wracked by radically different visions and an ongoing and wrenching fight against racial injustice.

In many ways, the new President will have a lot more to worry about than the scowling and aging Trump, heading for 80 with even more things to whine about. He and the other angry white men will have a lot of golf to play, and a lot of time to play it.

The best anyone can hope for from Trump is for him to be quiet and hold things together. That’s probably hoping for too much.

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” – Winston Churchill

 

When I was the executive producer of the CBS Morning News, my then boss, Ed Joyce (they called him “the velvet shiv”) and I were in a meeting one morning talking about the day’s news.

A suck-up fellow producer suggested to Ed that he think about getting into politics and maybe even running for President. Such flattery was standard fare in our meetings, no one blinked. I said the same thing to one of my anchors every day.

There was an awkward silence. I asked Ed if he was serious about it.

“No,” he said, “I’ve seen what happens to people who are on TV too much or for too long or too successfully. They lose touch with reality and can only think visually, in terms of images. They start to believe their own publicity and their egos blow up and eventually explode.”

Hmmm, I joked, “it sounds like Greek Tragedy.” Nobody laughed.

Well, yes, it does sound like that.

The older I get, the more respect I have for Greek Tragedy. It just keeps popping up, almost as if it were following me through life, or maybe I am following it. I think it is following Donald  Trump right now.

President Trump’s 2020 Suicide Express keeps rolling, it makes a new stop every day or so, and each one is crazier and more surreal than the one before it. He’s just lost it, and he can’t hide it, the news is getting so much bigger than him and his very small thinking.

He blew the Pandemic, he blew Minneapolis, he’s blowing the healing.

If I were not living it, I would simply not believe what I saw from St. John’s Church yesterday.

But since it was true, I hope I might be able to add slightly to some understanding of it. Being a television producer changed my life and my understanding of the world, for better and worse.

Yesterday, I felt I had a sense of what Trump was going for, and why it missed its mark in such a stunning way.

I recognize so much of that world in the increasingly desperate posturings and panicked maneuvering of this broken man.

He is all about visuals and is fearful of substance. It bites him in the ass every time he tries some. Visuals have always worked for him, from those red hats to the bloodthirsty rallies.

Like most good TV people, he lives in a world of images, just like dogs and cats. He lives above real people, above reality, above common sense.

But this year is unlike most years; there is that murderous and pesky Pandemic, all those deaths, a crumbling economy, ugly and wrenching racial turmoil that can’t be shunted aside, like Dr. Fauci.

Fortunately for me, I wasn’t great at TV and decided to become a book writer instead. That decision saved my life. I’m sure of it.

Donald Trump’s decision to tear gas and grenade-bomb hundreds of peaceful protestors in front of the White House yesterday was a historic catastrophe in political as well as civic terms. They will be talking about it for eons.

His opponents in politics and the media will stick it up the ass every day from now to November and beyond. Lots of stuff slide off of this man, but this one will stick. Because powerful images go both ways – they can make you or break you. They are easy to share and simple to digest.

The photo of him holding that Bible with his most serious face will be the defining image of his Presidency.

As most people know, President Trump chose to march from the White House across Lafayette Square to historic St. John’s Church (which he has attended twice in his Presidency) and arrange a photo op of his holding a bible high up in his right hand. His face was set like a statue of Caesar while looking as General Pattonish as he could with a squirrel’s next planted on the top of his head.

I’m not entirely sure what the Bible was doing there, my best guess is that it was a kind of secret handshake meant for the Evangelicals, his spiritual shock troops,  but forgetting all of us were also watching.

In order to get to the photoshoot on time, Trump had to send his palace guard out to browbeat and gas and frighten hundreds of people who came to the “People’s House” to demonstrate peacefully a sacred American ritual. The D.C.mayor said she couldn’t believe it.

Trump was thinking big screen movie all the way, walking well ahead of his favorite sycophants, pausing only for the media to get in position.

All the citizens had been pushed out of the square, most by force, and I kept thinking that what he was going for was that famous shot of General McArthur walking out of that landing craft in the Philippines and shouting for the reporters “I have returned.”

But then, there was that Bible…

Trump, stung by suggestions he had hidden in the White House Bunker while protesters surrounded the White House on Friday, was conjuring up a different image.

You had to look closely at the video to see that heavily armed police officers in combat gear were lined up every foot or two apart along the entire walk, plus the scores of Secret Service Agents walking alongside the President just out of camera range.

By then, of course, all of the ordinary people – the citizens – had been chased far out of sight. They had no place in this presentation; they were irrelevant to it, dispensable and unimportant. And booing wouldn’t go with the new image, the Law And Order President.

I presume that General Patton would have waded into those citizens for a blunt talk, our President made sure they were far away. George Washington risked his life in every battle, two horses were shot out from under him. The British thought he was superhuman.

McArthur only had a PR officer or two to shepherd him along his beach; Trump had a good-sized army to walk with him.

Our Law And Order President had to choose between compassion and healing or White Man Tarzan TV imagery, and it was no contest.

Trump went, as he always does, for the White Man’s Idea of Courage – stand tall and scowl like John Wayne in Fort Apache or Gary Cooper’s Will Kane in High Noon, or the President’s favorite General, George Patton, who had a  frown that was said to melt the turrets of Nazi tanks.

When he held up the now infamous Bible, Trump, already serious, put on a grim face. He meant to look heroic, but as a fellow older man in his 70’s, I thought he had to go to the bathroom.

I know that look.

Whoever suggested this idea to the President, or whoever failed to throw themselves in front of him as he set out to walk to the church with his Bible should be draped in a confederate flag and parachuted into South Minneapolis.

I’m not sure why he was holding up a bible at all, nor did he explain. I think we were supposed to see him as holy, King Arthur off to save the Kingdom.

The ridicule and condemnation from actual religious people rained down on him like Jehovah’s wrath all the next day. The Episcopal bishop of Washington – Marian Edgar Budde –  gave the Republican party a lesson in what it means to be tough.

She gave the President a thorough and bloody Jesus whooping. A Jesus whooping is what every politician most fears, there is usually no coming back from it.

Every politician who ever ran for office in America refers to Jesus at least once, usually much more frequently. And none of them seem to want to follow his teachings.

Bishop Budde, who is articulate and photogenic, blasted  Trump all through Wednesday, on one network and cable channel after another.

She said the Bible Photo-Op was an outrage:”Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence.” She noticed what Trump did not, that the protesters were peaceful and obeying the law.

Generally,  candidates for office don’t unleash armed men with batons, tear gas and noise grenades on innocent citizens taking advantage of their constitutional right to protest what they think is injustice.

Trump made it quite clear that he has never read the Bible, or perhaps even opened one. Bishop Budde pointed out that Jesus in her Bible preached love and compassion, not vicious dogs, incredible weapons, and combat soldiers. No wonder Trump looked so sour.

His adoring Evangelical followers  – all sworn Jesus lovers – ran for the hills and were nowhere to be found over the weekend. But they will have to love what he did. Do they really have a choice at this point?

Trump’s sexual and marital history and his general bullying and lying don’t make for great Bible holding. The President does not love his neighbors, he blasts them on Twitter.

What on earth was he thinking?

But I know what he was thinking. He was thinking of all those Evangelicals he was sure would love the Bible visual, even though it had absolutely nothing to do with what was happening in the country.

Most people don’t look for context or depth, the image speaks for itself.

I don’t think many of them would win a Jesus contest with Bishop Budde.  She will have no trouble drawing crowds to St. John’s this year.

Pundits everywhere were lining up to condemn the President and to speculate on how he could carry out such a heretic blunder. It is presumed that his loyal followers loved every minute of it, but I’m not sure that’s true.

The guys I saw standing outside of Stewart’s Convenience Store in my little rural town were rolling their eyes about, making crazy signals alongside their ears and wondering over and over what it was the President really had in mind.

Perhaps it helps to have worked in television for a while and understand, as Ed Joyce suggested, that TV is a visual medium, one of the images, not generally one of substance or nuance.

Trump’s Apprentice took off after he first showed his “You’re Fired” line. The images of ambitious people getting fired ignited the show. The image was riveting  We all thought he was just acting, but it turns out it was all too real.

That is the very image he projects, again and again, yelling at reporters, trashing people who criticize, spouting outrageous and shocking conspiracy theories whenever it gets slow.

I have to get back to the Last Stand Of the White Men theory I unveiled last night, a theory almost every journalist knows is true, but that very few have felt free to write.

My long-time theory about journalism is that if reporters wrote the things they say to one another, journalism would really rock.

At our twice-daily production meetings at CBS, we talked obsessively about visuals – images that would pop, stand out, connect with the viewer in a visceral or emotional way. Stories without strong visuals or images just didn’t get on the air. That’s why so many fires and explosions do.

Strong visuals are what every successful TV show has. It doesn’t matter what is said, it matters what is seen.

Trump’s obsession with White Men visuals – those red and white caps, those photo ops with veterans, athletes, soldiers and sheriffs, and Nascar drivers – are all about what I call White Men Tarzan photo ops.

It was clearly a huge mistake for him to try a Jesus video, even to those Evangelical “Christian” leaders, who are happy to push Jesus out of the way to get some tax breaks and political entry while they pretend to be persecuted.

At one point, it occurred to me that Trump was channeling Ceasar himself, who always posed for statues with his right arm up in the air

What he did instead was set himself up for a shitstorm of ridicule and condemnation.

Even I know what Jesus said in the New Testament, and I am not holding a dog-eared Bible in front of a church that doesn’t even know I ‘m coming.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” Jesus said in Mark 12:298-34.
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” is cited as his second most important command in the Bible.

The problem for Trump is that Jesus is all about love, and Trump is all about Trump. He looked as uncomfortable as I would look on a bear hunt. I did wonder once what Jesus would make of Mar-A-Largo, and golf with Trump’s pals.

Bishop Mudde dragged the President out to the shed and took the Jesus whip to him.

And she isn’t the only one chewing him out. By Sunday, two governors, a mayor and the police chief of Houston all went on TV to beg the President of the United States to shut up, to just stop talking.

Each one said he was making things worse every time he opened his mouth. That seemed shocking to me.

One thing I did learn in television was that the camera really doesn’t lie. You can dress up the hog, a cameraman once told me,” but you can’t turn him into a princess.”

Ed Joyce was right. I also witnessed the power of TV success to bend minds and alter perspectives. Most anchors I knew were driven made by their popularity, their egos ballooned beyond safety or sanity. Look at Charlie Rose or Matt Lauer.

Many just spiraled out of control and completely lost perspective. Trump was not always this mean, cold or destructive. His ego is exploding almost daily.

All of his biographers say he went over to the dark side soon after the Apprentice’s great success. His ego ran away with him. What was once fun became deadly serious, what was once showmanship became cruel and vengeful.

As he himself said in that infamous video, when you’re a star,  you can do things.

But when you are a President, it seems,  you can’t just do things. You are scrutinized and criticized and monitored and listened to in a way that would make any sane man or woman squirm.

The people who call themselves “progressive” or “Democrats” are still shell-shocked by the very existence of Trump, who has plowed right over and through their values and ideals.

Many are terrified to acknowledge how much trouble he is in, or how sad it is to see any human being come apart in so public and painful away.  Optimism frightens them, a bad trait in warriors preparing for battle.

I hate to use the term, but people supporting someone other than Trump need to suck it up a bit. Nearly half the country will support him no matter what he does, and that is not going to change.

I don’t pay much attention to it, I just know he is failing at almost every level.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump’s misjudgments, blunders, provocations, and crude insensitivity have become his identity and permanent persona, not just an occasional lapse or mistake.

While he was desperate to define Biden, he went and defined himself. He is in a deep hole, and he dug it himself.

While Trump was soiling himself in front of St. John’s Church, Joe Biden was praised to the skies for uttering a few pleasant and welcome platitudes about leadership. Captain America read his lines well and delivered them sincerely.

People seemed relieved just to hear some normalcy.

Biden has the gift of sounding nice even when he isn’t being nice.

What more could one ask than to campaign against Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, holed up in his castle, calling out the army to bluster and punish and cover for his irrational obsessions?

Even Joe Biden, a nice man not known for piercing wit, got off one of the best lines of the day, a hanging curve handed him by a Mad King losing his grip.

“He should have opened that bible,” said Biden of Trump, “he might have learned something.”

 

 

(Note: The purpose of my pieces on politics are not to hate anyone or boost anyone, but to try to explain to confused and frightened people what is really going on, using my own experience as a former TV news producer (CBS News) and as a political writer and reporter and media critic. I see a lot of argument, but very little honest insight and analysis. People need it, judging from my e-mail. I don’t do left-right parroted dogma, nor do I argue my ideas on social media. If you don’t want to think about things, go somewhere else, thanks.)

The first thing to understand is that President Trump is neither crazy nor stupid.

If he were either of those things, he would not be where he is, and I would not be writing about him, and you would not be reading what I write.

In political terms, he has accomplished the impossible and is now the most formidable force in American politics. It is imperative to understand how this happened and is happening.

The second is a quote from George Orwell: “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your choosing.” We can see that happening every day. That is his power.

Donald Trump has made it quite clear that he knows nothing about curing the coronavirus, or about medications and how they work or if they work. Nor does he care if what he is saying is true or false, or if it might kill people if we took it.

He is a survivor, and he will do what he has to do to survive, at all costs and by any means.

His survival now depends on him being accepted as a true leader during this crisis. If not for the partisanship crippling our politics, he would probably have resigned by now.

As it is, victory remains within reach for him, providing he can establish himself as a powerful and competent leader.

So what is really happening here, when a President of the United States suggests people might inject themselves with disinfectant to fight off a Pandemic? I look at it this way: I’m not interested in joining the chorus of outrage,  but in exploring this extraordinary window – his mind-numbing advice – into who he is and how he uses outrage for gain.

We’re not playing by the old rules, the way America processes things is radically different than what most of us know and accept, or what I grew up with. I take Donald Trump seriously.

This is something we need to understand if we want to know what is happening and how to respond to it.

Last night was another triumph for Trump, it worked for him in every possible way, and I want to try to explain why.

Every morning, we awake to a new and shocking Trump “controversy,” and all of the media oxygen in America is his. He takes up all the space in the media universe, day after day, more than any political figure in American history.

Every morning we – the people from the previous world – wake up in shock, anger, and disbelief. It works for him every time. No one has ever understood how modern media works better than President Trump. His political opposition has no idea what he is doing or why and how and why we are all complicit in his rise.

As a politician, Trump works the dark side, not the bright side. He doesn’t evoke a city on a hill, as Reagan did. He lives and works on the dark side of fear, grievance, and xenophobia. That’s where his political soul resides. That’s where his strength is.

This morning, the outrage of the day was his sly – and yes,  seemingly insane – ruminations about how ultra-violet light and sipping Bleach and disinfectant might cure the coronavirus.

Almost in unison, his many critics fumed and screamed – this is outrageous, irresponsible, dangerous. As they are ethically obliged to do, every responsible physician in America tweeted and sounded the alarm: don’t drink disinfectant, don’t try drinking bleach.

The people who dislike him freaked out, wringing their hands at yet another horror coming from the mouth of this President.

They made this President very happy, yet again. It worked one more time.

For President Trump, being outrageous is like pushing a button and watching Times Square light up at night. He can grab his remote switcher, lie in bed, watch the fireworks,  and see his image everywhere.

He makes Big Brother look like a pretzel vendor on the street.

The elemental truth there is that one can’t understand what he is doing by putting him down as an ignorant lunatic or getting stressed and discouraged.

This completely misses the point of what is happening. Media wise, Trump is pure genius, being outrageous is his core ideology, the reason he is President and might be once more. And in this corporate media climate – ratings and profits are everything, there is no other ethic – it just keeps on working.

To Trump, saying outrageous things is now an art form, he can sit back and watch journalists and millions of educated people jump up and down like hungry puppies. For cable news, it’s now a ritual, broadcast everything he says, and then argue about it. Everyone has bought into it.

What a travesty.

And everyone in the universe this morning has one thing in common: they are talking about one thing: Donald Trump, they are talking about him and thinking about him. There is nothing else; Trump takes precedent over everything,  even the deaths of 50,000 people.

Without this greedy corporate media, Trump would have long ago become a fringe figure. If I were looking for blame, I could go there. What a wide-open door for a demagogue.

That is what real power is—every day. So chalk up another win for the President.

Once again – for perhaps the thousandth time – everyone bit this morning, everyone did what they were supposed to do and what he wanted them to do. He wins by losing.

The so-called “Left” – liberals, progressives, college people, elitists, smarty-pants, etc. were outraged, angry, and lining up to condemn this unquestionably irresponsible, even dangerous idea.

How can he say such things? How does he get away with them?

How can we not know the answer to this question by now?

And when will we finally learn it, and move onto the next chapter in our political lives?

Once again, Fox News rushed to defend him. MSNBC rushed to attack him. CNN rushed to fact-check him, each pretending they are the honest brokers, that they care about the truth and health of people, each pulling in big ratings and billions of dollars. The serious print press – the New York Times, the Washington Post – tracked down various experts to explain to us why gulping down bleach isn’t a good idea.

By being “insane,” Trump is the story again, all day.

Once again, his followers rushed to defend him against the bureaucrats, elitists, and entrenched experts who are again plotting to thwart him and his so-called war against the norm.

Everybody bit, everyone followed his script. If it weren’t so disturbing and fraught, it would be boring.

I should say here that when I was a producer at CBS News, just before the corporate takeovers of TV and TV news, we would never have aired Trump’s press conference live for two hours every night in an election year.

That is how much things have changed in the media landscape. Donald Trump has been paying attention all along.

When I was hired at CBS, my boss told me that only one thing could get me fired instantly, and without any discussion or due process, and that was airing something I wasn’t sure was 100 percent true. If you’re not sure, he said, wait until you are.

If it’s inflammatory, or politically expedient, or irresponsible, don’t dare put it on the air.

The networks were hardly angelic then, but they were owned by individual people who had pride in them, and who felt accountable for what they puy on the air. There were four hundred fact-checkers at CBS News when I worked there, there is a handful now.

I don’t mention this to rail about the old days, but to point out the radical change in media ethics that is standard now in almost all of the broadcast media, online and off.  This and social media have transformed our politics.

They created a system that makes Donald Trump inevitable, as well as successful.

Facebook, one of the largest news organizations on the earth, is proud of taking no responsibility for what they publish. It is the kingdom of lies and provocations.

If CNN is concerned about airing President Trump’s calculated lies and misinformation about the coronavirus, they won’t air his press conferences for two hours every single night, so that they can “correct” them.

If MSNBC thinks the President is dishonest and dangerous, why broadcast his daily show and talk about him for hours and hours every single day?

Corporations – including Fox News – are constructed to care about one thing: profits and ratings bring benefits, and President Trump brings ratings and big profits. He doesn’t hate fake news, he loves fake news, and they love him in return.

While Fox News anchors dismissed the virus as a Democratic plot, the corporation was sending workers home to quarantine themselves and stay out of the office.

As for Trump himself, he understands well the lessons of modern media. It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong, honest, or lying. What matters is that you are out there, that your image is ubiquitous. In media terms, Trump is everything all the time. In politics, air time is more precious than anything.

How often have you seen Joe Biden on TV in recent weeks? This is what it means to be complicit.

There is no one else. Just think of that when you consider the political implications in an election year.

Trump’s genius comes from understanding that the more shocking, outrageous, and irresponsible he is, the more the media and “progressives”  will hate him,  his followers will worship him and accept him and rationalize him. What does he have to lose?

The process is stuck in the wrong place, and Trump knows how to milk this cow for all it’s worth. It’s simple enough to hate him for it, but it’s getting harder and harder to blame him for it.

Trump is like the cheeky schoolkid who dares to get up in front of the teacher and read a book report when it’s obvious he hasn’t read the book. Most of the class loves him for it.

To his followers, he is the rebel, the outlier, the renegade, challenging the system, and its conventional wisdom every single day.  In this sense, they see him as one of them. If every doctor goes on TV to say never inject yourself with disinfectants, he says think about it, study it, don’t let the establishment tell you what to do or think.

And if there’s anything his followers hate more than journalists, it’s rich doctors that they and their children can’t afford to go and see. Why should they listen to them?

It’s an appealing message to the alienated and dispossessed.  Whatever the establishment says, say the opposite. All criticism is a conspiracy.

For President Trump, the essential thing is topping himself almost every day by being outrageous and, to some, offensive. Open up the states (kind of), stop giving money to the WHO (maybe), ban all immigration (mostly), think about sipping Bleach to kill the coronavirus. And this is all in one week.

He knows most people can’t even keep track of all the outrageous feints, promises, and falsehoods. In our country, outrage has a shorter lifespan than milk. TV is never static, up and running 24/7; it is even needier than the Presidents’ Grievance Machine.

What on earth would they do without him?

And what is the common denominator? The so-called “elites” are angry and messed up and outraged. Always. They are offended at the Presidente so often that outrage isn’t even outraged any longer, it’s reflex.

His followers get to admire his courage and daring, the media has a dream story that will earn them lots of money day after day, and they get to pretend to be virtuous,  holier than thou, and full of “truth.”

And yes, our minds are being torn to pieces.

Trump has mastered Orwell’s doublethink more than anyone in the history of modern media.

It is a major reason he is President and the primary reason he needs to be outrageous, each day more than the next.  He has created a monster that is hungry and needs to be fed: every day.

Doublethink, wrote George Orwell, is the power that comes from holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.

One day the President admits in writing to the quid pro quo, the next day he says it’s a hoax. And nearly half the country believes today that it was a hoax. Call him anything you want, but don’t call him crazy.

If you study the texts of his outrages and outright lies, you can see the calculation and animal instincts in play. He isn’t just running his mouth; he knows precisely what he is doing.

One day he calls the Governor of Georgia to commend him for opening up businesses in his state when every medical expert says it’s too soon.

The next day at his press conference, he cuts the governor’s legs off by saying that he told him opening up was a huge mistake.

This is how doublethink works so well for him  – he can hold two or three different truths at one, tearing human minds to pieces and putting them back together again in new shapes of his choosing.

When reporters challenge him, he further delights his followers by calling them names and insulting them, showing them how tough he is, how willing he is to stand up against his conspiratorial detractors and accusers.

The difficult questions do not harm him; they strengthen him, give him some martyrdom. Every night there, he is,  for two hours at a pop, an extraordinary gift of free television for a political candidate. In the moral inversion that Trump has so skillfully created, there is no lying, no penalty for being false.

Every lie is a win. And all of us are enablers.

The befuddled and abused journalists in the White House press room are perfect foils for Donald Trump; they are content to be both abused and used. Why else would he submit to their questions when he fires anyone else who disagrees with him?

Early on in his first campaign, a friendly reporter asked him why he seemed to hate the media so much?

“I don’t hate them at all, he said, I need them. I call them fake so that when I do something wrong, and they report it, no one will believe them.”  Does that sound dumb to you?

The political challenge in 2020 is that Trump understands his followers better than anyone else running for office or hating him understands them. Dismissing them as stupid fools is not understanding them, it is feeding them – and him –  more fuel.

This morning, his followers had yet another reason to hate the media and the doctors and bureaucrats and governors telling them what to do, calling them dumb and irresponsible, taking away their jobs, and threatening their families.

Outside the convenience store this morning, the men in trucks were already on it: he’s just trying to come up with a cure, he didn’t tell people to drink Bleach, he just asked if they were testing the idea,  look at how they jump all over his ass because he’s trying to help people. They’ll do anything to destroy him.

That is the genius of Trump right there if you wish to understand what’s happening.

You take people who have been lied to and left behind for generations now, and come along and say I will take this system and set it on fire. It’s the perfect storm of the Demagogue.

Every outrageous thing he says or does or that shocks or goes against the grain, becomes a part of the revolution they so badly want, and believe is at hand.

Every criticism becomes part of the vast conspiracy to make him fail.

Being outraged with and to one another doesn’t accomplish much but tear us to pieces. People will have to put it somewhere, that means something if it is to matter politically.

The shrinks always talk about accepting death, and they might also suggest accepting Trump, and not turning every stupid thing he says into Watergate. He’s not getting into my head in that way, I promise.

Trump, or somebody in his orbit, is a student of George Orwell, and especially of his landmark book,1984.

In a righteous world, the networks would not cover his press conferences. There is no real news in them, and they are thinly disguised and re-furbished political rallies, the kinds he could go outside for before the coronavirus.

Why should the networks give him so much political rallying time when they admit every day that he is spouting lies and misinformation?

Producers know the only reason they air them at all is so that they can either defend him or attack him the next morning, and make even more money—our political structure as a circus.

It’s like the Weather Channel has a record-breaking blizzard to report on every single day. Their ratings and their revenues would go through the roof.

To understand  Trump, I believe, I must appreciate him as a Media Creature, from beginning to end. He spends most of his time watching TV in his bedroom or office, and projecting and experimenting with his image and surviving one catastrophe after another, including four separate bankruptcies, after which he published a best-selling book about his business genius.

I can’t speak to his business skills, but I can testify to his media genius. Politicians will be studying his methods for generations.

The challenge for the polis – for the body politic is different. I don’t ask whether Donald Trump is right or wrong, or accurate or dishonest, or crazy or sane.

The coronavirus may be too much even for doublethink; what we see and feel might be too powerful for even a genius to manipulate.

Trump has set his outrageous bar so high that it may be impossible for him to maintain it without blowing up the country altogether. If it’s a mistake to glory the common man and woman, it would be a mistake to underestimate them.

I keep thinking of the Greek playwrights – the hero always goes too far and sets himself on fire. Hubris is his real enemy, not the millions of people fussing or fuming over him every day. They are all, to a one, his greatest allies, and enablers.

When I saw the headlines this morning, I reminded myself not to waste a minute of time or peace of mind wondering why he would tell such irresponsible lies yesterday.

The challenge is not to argue that what he says is true, or succumb to hatred,  but to understand why he is saying it and why so many people might believe it.

As Orwell argued, you really can’t fight doublethink with rational argument, but with comprehension and understanding.

Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.

I’m a betting man, and if I had to bet, that’s what I would bet on. What I won’t be doing is taking his bait every single day. I want to keep the pieces of my mind together, and in one place.

Every time we speak to a friend, here or far away, we learn of things they are doing to fend off the virus that we are not doing, and don’t wish to do.

I gratefully abide by all of the directives I ‘ve been told to follow. But I am balking at some that go over a line in my soul and threaten to steal too much of my life and identity.

I will avoid people, wear a mask outdoors, stay inside for several weeks or longer,  walk the dogs in isolation, wash my hands in industrial soap every time something comes near, or into my home.

The moral decisions and challenges that swirl around the coronavirus are enormous. We are asked almost daily to alter our ordinary lives, in effect to stop living, make choices that affect us and others, and accede to the whittling away of our lives.

We are called upon to make these changes and sacrifices for our sakes and for the greater good. Normally, these requests are made only in wartime, and we are being told every day that we are in a war.

And not to be dramatic about it, these decisions really are about life or death, mine or somebody else’s.

I’ve been poring through my moral bible, Hannah Arendt’s “Responsibility and Judgement,” the best guide I know to individual’s responsibility to do good.

It helps. And I’ve been thinking about who I wish to be and have been when this is over.

“There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done,” Arendt writes. “No one can be held liable for them. But there is no such thing as being or feeling guilty for things that happened without oneself actively participating in them.”

When we are all guilty, nobody is, she argues. Guilt always singles out the individual; it is strictly personal.

But the coronavirus is different in terms of my moral choices, it asks me to take responsibility for things I don’t do and also to feel guilty for things that have happened without my direct participation in them.

The college students who defiantly partied on the beaches of Florida while people all over the country were dying or being begged and warned to stay inside, were widely condemned as selfish and immoral.

The students were not only putting their health at risk,  they also risked spreading this virus to everyone they met or saw back home, including their friends,  parents, and grandparents.

Many of them told reporters they knew it was potentially dangerous to go on Spring Break, they just didn’t care. More instruction about moral choices might be a good idea. And where, I wonder, were their parents, many of them footing the bill.

To me, there is no grey there, only black and white. But there are plenty of greys all around the coronavirus.

I won’t be around groups of people or stand close to them. This is not only because I might get sick, but because they might get sick from me—very few Pandemics since the plague that challenged us in that way.

I stand well apart from the few people I do talk to in person. I buy only what I need. I don’t disinfect cereal boxes.

How do we make choices like this?

How can I do the right thing without merely acceding to the dramatic and the obsessively fearful? – a friend of ours spends five or six hours wiping down every package and box of food from the grocery when she brings the food home.

No respectable doctor or health official recommends doing that or feels it is necessary. They often say, well it can’t hurt, or it’s okay out of an abundance of caution. Is that really enough to shrink my life so completely that I feel like a wimpy Ant-Man some days?

We are asked to wear coverings on our faces.

Still, we are not told to wear coverings (I am determined to stay inside unless it is essential, I abide by that directive. President Trump went out of his way to say he wouldn’t wear a mask, giving doubtful people an easy out.)

I draw a line between what I am told to do and what some anxious friend or earnest health official suggests I might do, in the name of prudence, not scientific fact.

I consider it a moral obligation to respect Maria’s fears about my safety and about her losing me.

It is tempting sometimes to some men – and to me –  to belittle or dismiss these fears as extreme or unwarranted. That is immoral, and I don’t do it anymore. It is disrespectful.

I might balk or complain, but I feel a responsibility not to add to my wife’s anxiety or peace of mind. We, also, are in this together.

We talk out our differences, and she gets the final say.

If she says I can’t do it, or that it worries her, I don’t. I don’t consider this an abrogation of my responsibility – I am responsible for my health and welfare – I believe this to be the very essence of responsibility.

Maria doesn’t wish to be my keeper; she wants to live with me and keep our life together. So do I.

Once or twice, we have disagreed, and I made my own choice.

I relate in many ways to President Trump’s eagerness to get people to return to normal life. Lots of people who have caught the virus are suffering in awful ways.

I also identify with my governor, Andrew Cuomo, and his argument that to save many lives from this Pandemic, we must radically restrict our own. I’m not sure there is a simple resolution to those differences.

I do believe we all have a moral responsibility to one another to provide comfort and safety to those in distress. None of us live alone in this world.

The virus is a perfect storm for anxious and restless people asked to abandon their lives for days, weeks, even months, without anything to do and much to fear. That’s one of the best ways I’ve ever heard of to get crazy quickly.

We receive a constant stream of directives, requests, warnings, and guidelines, many of them increasingly reflecting our polarizing country, not our unity of purpose. And many of them change.

There is a visible and ever more public struggle between our President and the scientists, health officials, and doctors.

They seem to have different views about how dangerous this virus is, or how long we need to cancel normal life, and precisely what we can and should do to protect ourselves and our neighbors, family, and friends.

Many wonder about the havoc wreaked on our economy and family life isolation and business shutdown goes on for too long. Balancing the two would knock Socrates out.

What I relate to about Governor Cuomo’s briefings is that he doesn’t rationalize or prevaricate: he tells me clearly what he wants me to do and why I should do it. If essential, it’s an order, not a request. That takes equivocating and bloviating out of my hands.

So I do what he says.

More and more, these moral decisions are being left up to us, the targets of this oddly moral virus. To some degree, that is welcome. In another sense, it is dangerous, even lethal.

Another friend who lives in San Francisco leaves all of his Amazon, UPS, USPS, and FedEx packages outside for 24 hours in case the virus is living in the cardboard for a short time, as it is rumored to do. He’s not sure where he heard this, or if it’s true, but just in case, he said, he’s doing it.

That is not a directive from scientists, health officials, or doctors (there is no accepted evidence that this is necessary or effective. The CDC instead recommends washing with soap after packages are opened), but it has become a common practice for people trying to cover every possible way for the virus to not come into their homes.

Police report that this makes package thieves very happy.

Sometimes, it seems to me that people at home who are given to anxiety – I was diagnosed as being mentally ill because of my anxiety – are obsessing on every possible way to disinfect anything that people might touch or breathe anything outside of their homes.

There is no end to it.

It seems clear to me that this is a futile effort, a way to surrender more of life than is required or healthy or necessary. This is where I am starting to draw the line. I can be smart; I can not be 100 percent safe.

It would really make me bonkers to try to disinfect every package or product or food that comes to me from anywhere in world, through the hands and trucks and lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people I can’t see and will never know.

I measure how much time I want to spend fending off this virus, it can not and should not take up my whole life or be the driving force behind it. There are, in fact, some things worse than death for me.

Having no experience outside of the virus would be one of them. I want to keep a chunk of my life alive.

It takes a powerful and grounded person to stay steady and clear during this confusing and sometimes terrifying Pandemic,  bearing down towards us like molten lava pouring out of a volcano.

The news, pouring in on our day and night, is often horrifying and discouraging.

Social media is a festering sore of panic, misinformation, gossip, and rumor. Amateur shrinks and gurus and doctors thrive there, feeding off everybody’s fears. I see them as our modern digital vampires.

I have no moral qualms about staying inside,  avoiding people, washing my hands repeatedly. It is for my benefit and the benefit of others.

I do not spend hours, even minutes wiping down every grocery item with disinfectant. Nor will I leave packages outside overnight (unless Dr. Fauci tells me I must).

Aside from everything else, the bears would love our boxes from Chewy.com.

My daughter lives in Brooklyn, and I have friends in Boston,  Brooklyn, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Most of them live in rental apartments where it would be impossible to leave packages out.

None of them give it a thought, and no one has raised the alarm about it, and nobody thinks these packages have harmed any of the people receiving them, which is everybody, every day.

I don’t tell other people what to do, and I don’t judge other people for responding differently than I do.

I want to be both ethical and moral, and compassionate. I want to be a helper, not the helped. And I don’t ever want to inject myself into the lives of other people struggling with their own decisions.

I am 72 years old and not at all eager to die, but at the same time, I want to retain as much of my life as I can, I don’t wish to live without any consciousness of my own. That can be a fine line to walk, and there are lots of ways for people to die.

I think often of T.S. Eliot’ “Hollow Men.” Spending the day cleaning my grocery packages sends some chills down my spine, it doesn’t get too much hollower than that for me.

For me, staying away from Jean’s Place is a moral issue, I’m abandoning my moral obligation. I choose the people I try to help carefully because if I don’t care about them, I can’t write well about them.

I often come to love them.

Pictures and stories from my blog have helped Kelsie and her family weather the forced closing of their restaurant. They are my friends, and they need me. I am not their savior, but I can help.

Abandoning them ultimately would seem a betrayal for me. But I no longer go there every day, sometimes Maria drives me there and she goes in to get the food, and I might every now and then go in with a mask and get my sandwich and photo and get out.

On my last regular visit to Jean’s – this was a very hard moment for me – Kelsie and I agreed to do a selfie together. This remembrance was important to both of us. It only took a few minutes for  Dorothy to post this message on my blog:

“Dear Jon, Kelsey is not safe with no mask, and she should not be that close. You chose to model safe and healthy behavior by wearing a mask, and that’s admirable. But incorporated into your advertisement for healthy behavior, you have included a person with no mask, appearing right over your shoulder, and she has no gloves on.”

I wrote back to Dorothy and told her that I don’t dispense medical advice to people, and I don’t tell others what to do. There is nothing “admirable” about wearing a mask.

Kelsie was well behind me (I didn’t measure the distance), and she is well aware of my safety, and she is a big girl who must make her own decisions in life, as I make mine.

Beyond that, there is no state, local, or federal directive requiring me or anybody else to wear a mask. I wear it out of an abundance of caution, a term I respect but dislike. Why should Kelsie be forced to wear something even the President has chosen not to wear? And is it anyone’s business to make moral decisions for Kelsie and me from afar.

That would be another horrific legacy of the coronavirus.

I think we often speak of morality in metaphorical terms – we are guilty for the sins of our fathers, for crimes we have not committed, we believe we will pay for our mistakes, doing good is its own reward.

These expressions of guilt, bad conscience, and confessions of wrongdoing and frequently hypocritical handwringing, play an enormous role in our legal system and moral judgments of one another.

That’s why Dorothy feels entirely free to tell Kelsie and me what she thinks we should do, not even what we are being ordered to do.

She doesn’t need to be asked or accountable.

Hannah Arent writes, “it may be wise to refrain from such metaphorical statements, which, when taken literally, can only lead into a phony sentimentality in which all real issues are obscured.”

Amen to that.

I don’t have this virus and will work hard not to get it or pass it on. Many people are giving their lives for it.

In a very different sense, I sometimes feel I’m fighting for mine.

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

I believe that I cannot protect myself from sadness without protecting myself from happiness, because one is the twin of the other, both joined at the hip.

If you can’t be sad, you can’t know what it means to be happy. Just like light follows the darkness.

This path month I have been sad, worn down by hatred and argument, and by my own sometimes fragile soul.

I have to be honest, and admit that the past month knocked me down and brought me to a bad place. Too many things came together all at once – the sad state of our country, the loss of my computer, a  grinding tech ordeal involving my photographs, the sudden inability to write what I wanted when I wanted, my realization that my life as a book author is truly over, and the sadness, death and neediness I see almost every day of my life.

Every day I was distracted and drained by problems I couldn’t solve, damage I couldn’t fix. Nothing is worse for a creative head than that.

I didn’t experience anything that almost everyone reading this experiences from time to time, I am just a human dealing with the life of a human. But it felt -and was – relentless.

The computer photo troubles were somehow especially debilitating. They knocked my confidence and optimism down, the sense I am coping well with my life, doing something meaningful, something that matters.

It went on for so long, and was so frustrating.

My agent and I cooked up a great book idea, but there were no takers. I don’t want to write books any longer, I love writing on my blog, but I guess I wanted it to be my choice, not theirs.

Identity is precious, time for me to embrace this change and learn to love it.

I told Richard that if I couldn’t sell this great idea behind one of the best agents in the country with five New York Times best sellers under my belt, that it was time let go of books and quite happily devote myself my creative work – my writing, my photos – to my blog, which grows both in meaning, audience and intensity.

People visit my blog four million times a year, and there is no way even I can call that failure.

My angels are trying to tell me a great truth, and I am finally open to hearing it.  Change, they say, move forward, the light burns brightly inside of you. You have a lot to offer.

For so much of my life, my identity has been tied to writing books, I am so fortunate to have this new identity, which I love and has led me to good and great work.

I am not one of those people to lament growing older, but it is true that part of growing older is learning when to let go and how to let go.

For awhile, technology stole my identity and my purpose and my confidence, and that felt like a betrayal to me. I was suddenly quite helpless, at the mercy of others, and it brought up old feelings and struggles.

When I look at this photo of my granddaughter heading out for Halloween in a Stegosaurus suit that I bought for her, I am lifted up by life on the other end of the spectrum. Hers is a message of hope and promise, I want to help leave her with a better world.

Sometimes my heart is filled with sorrow at the cruelty, hatred and conflict that is tearing us apart. I truly am helpless there, and most days it inspires me to get busy and do good and sometimes – the past two months – it just brings me down.

Doing good brings me up.

Tonight, I went to the Mansion, Maria and I called the Bingo Game. I had fun teasing the residents, i started singing versus of Amazing Grace while I got boos and lots of ribbing. But lots of laughs. I was just where I should be, doing just what I should be doing.

Today, I began to heal and feel better. I send a box of baseball caps engraved with “Bishop Maginn Mural Mob” to the very gifted mural painters at Bishop Maginn High School. I shipped five boxes of blankets, sweaters, shoes and socks to the school. I was told that every child who needed a sleeping bag or blanket got one.

That is a beautiful thing to know as this cold descends. (Thank you).

At the Mansion, Sylvie told me she missed me when I was gone and  handed me another letter to read. Peggie asked if I could help get her a winter coat so she could go outside. Helen was sitting in a hallway, she said she was cold. I gave her a lap robe that she loved. Tim came over in his wheelchair to thank me for his racing car jigsaw puzzle..

I got a lego set for Tia’s son. Nancy and Bert got the sweaters they needed in this cold weather

And Maria and I helped a sheep, Izzy, to die a humane and merciful death. She was awfully sick.

My new computer is working well for me so far and I am writing freely again.

I am getting my identity back. For much of my life, I have battled different forms of anxiety and depression, but not for some years. I know one is never completely done with those kinds of illnesses, but over the past few weeks I did lose myself a bit, it’s like a deep well is punctured and spews black mud.

People suffer a lot worse than I have, but this hit me in my vulnerable spot, knocked me down again. I’ve been there before, I don’t like it. My eyes are fine, but I worried there was danger.

And frankly, I was just tired. The last few years have been hard and wonderful. But my head needed a break, and my computer co-operated. I’ve got a lot of stuff going all the time, all of it is rewarding, none of it simple.

I am bounding back, otherwise I would not even be writing this. Back to my good and wonderful life, full of love and purpose. Well prepared for another winter. When I was young, my mother told me to eat all of my food because children were starving in other countries.

But fear and sadness don’t work that way. It doesn’t matter what other people feel. We don’t get to give our troubles away.

We feel what we feel. Pain is pain, loss is loss, fear is fear. To live without those feelings is to not be human, and I am proud and grateful to be so very human.

I just felt like sharing all of that as I am putting my life back together.  I am getting my mojo back, feeling less helpless and at the mercy of others. I am filling up again with energy. Maybe it was Chris’s lucky $100 bill, or the arrival of Zinnia, a bright and cheerful creature.

Sadness for me is cleansing, purifying, it flushes out the bad stuff, and leaves room for the light.

I have so much to do, so much to live for. A friend wrote a blog post with began with the words “of course,  nobody likes getting older.”

I messaged her right away. “I like getting older,” I wrote. “Am I anyone?” Yes, I think so. I am.