Are you afraid? That's just what 'they' want
Especially at risk: Gen X
vol. 5 issue 8
Greetings,
There has been a steady stream of new subscribers lately.
Thank you and welcome!
My aim is to provoke you, while also making you laugh, because as Oscar Wilde observed, if you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better be funny or else they will kill you.
And I do plan to lay a truth on you. Actually, three of them.
The first is that if you live in fear of something, chances are high you’re being controlled by someone whose agenda is for you to never not be afraid of that thing.
It’s a truth I keep rediscovering on what I am now calling my Temporary Homelessness Tour 2023 which began late last year inside the Beltway where I lived up until my recent divorce.
Currently, I am in America’s Dairyland, also known as Wisconsin for those of you who haven’t had occasion to see the stream of license plates bolted to the Buicks driven by Boomers high tailing it South on I-75 for Tennessee, the state where I have, to date anyway, spent the longest leg of this journey. Also the place where land is still cheap and taxes are for suckers, thus the exodus.
As for Wisconsin, the Boomers’ might be thinning out, but the Gen Xers like myself are everywhere. I have noted my peers and I have a lot more in common as Americans than we do differences, even if at first we seem less similar than we are.
Take my temporary neighbor, for example. Over the chain link fence, I told him I used to be a reporter in Washington. He gave me a variation of the typical response I get from most folks who don’t live somewhere within the New York-Philly-Washingtonlopolis corridor where even just a sniff of potential insider knowledge is like crack cocaine.
All such outsider responses can be boiled down to, “That must have sucked.”
My temporary neighbor, a white middle-aged American who, like me, came of age when microwaves were still a novelty, explained to me why he, “no offense” (none taken), doesn’t pay attention to the news any more.
The media, he said, just depresses him and makes him feel anxious, unhappy. He was lucky, he said, that his recent recovery from an illness coincided with the covid lockdowns, giving him the perfect excuse to isolate and not have to take in all that negativity. He didn’t want to hear about all the ways he was “supposed” to care.
“Now, I am perfectly happy being an introvert.”
Lucky!?