Monday, March 14, 2022

Everything’s Coming Up Buttercups

A) He’s trying to sell books.
B) He’s not fooling anyone who wasn’t fooled before.
Besides, we got that, right? As the cliche has it: “You and what army?” (And can we declare a moratorium on people who “know” what Putin wants? It’s not helping. I know what I just said, but I’m tired of this line of “analysis.”) Russia is bogged down in Ukraine.  NATO could push Russian forces back across the border about as easily as Saddam was pushed out of Kuwait. Hell, Ukraine may yet do it. Yes, we’ll always have videos. Please. By the time I was 28 (1983, IOW), I’d lived through the Cuban missile crisis; Vietnam; the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, and disco (don’t laugh if you weren’t there). My memory of the missile crisis (and all the movies/TV shows about nuclear war) was asking my mother why we didn’t have a bomb shelter. I remember the room and her standing at the ironing board. She said she didn’t want to live in what we know call a post-apocalyptic world where the living envy the dead. Imagine your mother telling you that; and why you’d never forget it.  Especially when you realized she was right. What other generation grew up with that knowledge?

I also remember “duck ‘n’ cover, CONELRAD, public fallout shelters, and the testing of air raid sirens. I was born into the threat of the “final” world war, which was relieved, but not ended, by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Old people get to say “Suck it up, buttercup.” If only because so many younger people whine in public about how many bad things in the world worry them because they think they can make the bad people go away. They can’t. Suck it up.
Something much more useful. See? We don’t know what Putin’s thinking. We don’t even know why he’s doing what he’s doing. Every crisis is an opportunity. I like exposing Bill Barr for what he is. Better than people thinking he quit because he was so noble.

Two sides to every coin, people. Like this:
Putin may have done the world a service. Funny how evil does that, now and again. Reminds us of what we could lose, I mean. It’s not worth it, but we seem to insist on making it work that way. Trump did us that service. Putin’s doing it for the world.

So it goes. Mostly because we insist on making it go that way, while insisting that’s just the way it is.

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