Jeff Whitten

Columnist

This is one of those last minute deals where you pull something resembling a column out of a part of your anatomy you can’t name in a family newspaper, and for me it isn’t a first. Not by a longshot.

There’s something dreadful and awful about deadlines, like they’re a sword of Damocles, or worse, a gaggle of fundraisers grouped up outside a supermarket wanting your money for their good cause and you don’t have any cash to give them.

I had thought, in my semi-retirement, I might be able to relax on deadline day and for a long while I was and did. But after doing something for so long the old feeling of needing to be doing something newspaperish on Wednesdays started to creep back into my subconscious, then my consciousness and so it went.

Suffice it to say sometimes every so often here I am, thanks to the BCN, trying to come up with an idea on which to wax dimly poetic, or at least goof around.

Politics are out, of course. I am mostly apolitical these days and have friends and family on both sides of the current divide, and have learned the best way to discuss politics is not to discuss them at all. Which is hardly the best way to live in a country such as ours, where folks should be able to compromise, but when everyone is convinced they know everything and their way is the right way then there isn’t much room for meeting in the middle.

I blame the self-esteem movement for this and for-profit motives; we’ve been marketed at and to for so long we have this innate sense that as both customers and Americans we’re always right. When you’ve been brought up as the center of the universe it’s not easy to share, or give equal weight to other views, especially when they run counter to yours.

I also blame broadcast media types for blurring the lines between factual reporting and straight news, and in particular a certain far-right network for successfully convincing a large portion of the population that those of us in the middle and mainstream are somehow out to get them, or if not that at the very least ruin the country. I suspect that if there is a hell, then Rupert Murdoch and his kind will go there and before long probably make it worse.

But don’t worry. Plenty of media rabble rousers from the other end of the political spectrum will be there as well to help ruin it for the rest of us.

I find it interesting that while we seem as a populace to be equally divided on most issues – our current president only got around 49 -percent of the popular vote, mind you, enough to eke out a win but hardly a resounding majority – the party in power at the moment claims it has a mandate to do all sorts of things in the name of saving the US from itself, and that’s clearly hogwash. It doesn’t stop the believers, though.

Which makes one wonder why those who seem to dislike the government so much fight so hard to be in charge.

I have thought about the rule of law some as of late, given the Jan. 6 pardons – some of which were likely justified, while others made my stomach turn – and have decided that if eggs weren’t so expensive and traffic so bad one day I might go up to Congress and egg some congressmen just on general principle. After all, I am hardly likely to get into trouble for it, and if I did I suspect a good lawyer could get me off by pointing out there are recent and worse precedents for that sort of lunatic behavior.

I might also decide I don’t want to use daylight savings time and if our various governments can’t get their acts together to do something then I’ll go it alone, and if I’m late for something or early for something you’ll just have to understand I’m exercising my right of free speech.

There are some other things I am pondering, such as tariffs and renaming bodies of water and threatening to make friendly countries into states or worse. I, for example, would love to find a way to put some sort of tariff on yankees, er, northern transplants, but I’m afraid it might boomerang on me somehow and we’d wind up with even more moving into our neck of the woods. I would also like to build a wall somewhere on this side of Ohio. As for the Gulf of Mexico, er, America, well, I’m sorry but that’s just silly and has nothing to do with the trillions of dollars of debt or the cost of groceries or insurance or anything else.

Similarly, the renaming of military installations or purging of mention of things the far right finds objectionable seems unlikely to make this country’s ability to fight wars any better, but that seems to be much of the focus in the early days of Fox News running the Department of Defense. And, there’s something downright sad about the mass firings of people who did nothing wrong, though to be honest reductions in force, as they are known, have happened before in efforts to balance the budget.

I am also embarrassed as an American by how our government’s foreign policy has evolved, but that’s just me. It does, however, send a clear message to a number of longtime allies that it’s a good idea to trust the US only so far as you can throw it, at least at present. And for those poor people in benighted places who received meals courtesy of US taxpayers for so long, well, sorry, the free ride is over – even though it was clearly in our best interests as a nation and, more importantly, humane, Christian (or a faith of your choice) and kind to donate hardly 1 percent of our annual budget to lend a helping hand to the starving and less fortunate in countries that would love to have our problems.

Sadly, those of us who aren’t thrilled with the way things are going don’t seem to have a good plan B at the moment, so the best thing to do may be to make the best of it and realize that no matter how this all turns out, it could always be worse and, in many places, is. And to know that those we disagree with aren’t the enemy, even if sometimes they may think we are. And maybe to understand for every action these days there is an equal overreaction.

It occurs to me now as this thing winds itself up that I said I wouldn’t write politics and then did just that. But then again, consider the source of this column as pointed out in the lede.

Be nice to us old people and pets and kids and have a great weekend. Erin go bragh.

Now retired, Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.