Why Bother?

In years past, there were times, based on what happened to be in the news, when I felt a measure of embarrassment for my race, my gender, my nationality, etc. But those times were the exception, not the rule. In the months since the childish, uncouth creature began his pretendsidency, there has rarely been a single day that I haven’t felt embarrassed for my country. That kind of constant shame is tiring. It wears on a person.

The only times I haven’t felt that way were if I happened to not be online for a day here or there. Maybe that’s the answer. Not be online. Not be aware. Maybe I should withdraw from society, go off the grid, take up luddism as a way of life. It’s not like my voice is heard by anybody who can make a difference, anyway. I spout my opinions into the worldwide ether, angry at the idiots making a mess of the world, certain that my beliefs are the correct ones, the right ones, the moral ones. I cast my vote, happy that the majority of my countrymen felt the same way and cast the same vote, but angry and discouraged that the majority’s voice didn’t matter.

But my aired opinions make even less impact than my vote. The idiots don’t hear or read my blathering. The bloviating bonehead leaving a slime-trail through the Oval Office, when he’s not playing golf, doesn’t read what I have to say, and if he did, he wouldn’t care -- assuming he even understood it. The miserly morons in Congress are too busy filling their pockets to bother with my complaints. The cowardly killers with their gun stockpiles, looking to mow down the next group of unarmed innocents, are too focused on their deviant hatred for whatever it is they hate to give any attention to what I have to say. Even the everyday people around me who still support the dumbasses despite everything they’ve shown us to prove their dumbassedness. Constant exposure to that kind of asininity is exhausting, not to mention disheartening.

So what difference does it make what I think? Why should I go to the trouble of airing my complaints? Hell, why should I pay enough attention to the lunacy to even HAVE complaints?

Well, I know that it’s encouraging for me to see other people who still have possession of their faculties making intelligent, informed choices about the many issues that assault us every day. People expressing moral outrage at the mismanagement of resources or the mistreatment of marginalized citizens. Fellow Americans calling out the corruption of our so-called representatives.

If I can feel some consolation from that, then maybe my babbling might have a similar effect on a few others. It’s good to know that we’re not alone. Sometimes it seems as if we’re surrounded by happily misled boneheads, content, even confident in the rightness of their beliefs despite overwhelming evidence of facts. But there’s safety in numbers. And if the election taught us anything, regardless of the outcome, it’s that there are more of us than there are of them.