[I’ve been limiting my consumption of politics. Too many lies will give you indigestion. Even so, corruption and manipulation is so damn prevalent that it’s hard to evade. Maybe they’ve slipped past your guard. If so, I hope today’s post will help.]
If you’ve ever paddled a canoe you know that wind or current, if they’re against you, can become a beastly challenge. This happened to me one blustery afternoon many years ago. I was padding a solo canoe when a nasty headwind came up. It dropped my progress to near zero. I’d entered the river from many miles ago. A car was positioned many miles ahead. There was nowhere in the vicinity from which I could “bail out”. I could exit the river but I’d have to hike miles cross country to the nearest road… while carrying a canoe on my head. And then what? Hitchhike? With a canoe on my head?
There was nothing I could do but keep paddling. So I did; with the best attitude I could manage.
Paddling against the wind I felt time slow down. At first I was moving solidly. I’d be eating a burger at a restaurant in a few hours! Then I was moving slowly but I’d get to the next bend in the river in just a few minutes. Then I hit bottom.
The horizon was too far away to consider. I found myself comparing my position to trees on shore. I marked progress in inches. Ever so slowly I’d pull up alongside a tree, paddling furiously I’d hold my own against the wind; inching forward. Then, after what felt like hours, the tree would be behind me and I’d be struggling to get to the next tree.
I was a young man; stubborn, tough, too determined to quit. Quitting would have been pointless anyway. If gave into despair then what? Stand on the shore of a remote river crying into the wind?
Of course I continued, what kind of man just plain quits… over wind?
It was a hard day. The struggle went on for hours. In the middle of it, there was a moment when I started to lose faith. I started grumbling my complaints at the trees. The jerks! Solidly rooted on shore not twenty feet from an overworked monkey in a borrowed canoe getting his ass kicked!
Then it dawned on me. I’d get to my staged car eventually. It wasn’t in question. The destination was assured. All that remained was the struggle of getting there.
I wasn’t strong enough to move quickly against the wind but I was tough enough to paddle all night if I had to. I’d get there! If it took an hour, a day, a week, all my life… I was going to get there. The only uncertainty was how epic the story would be when recalled in leisure.
It’s not much of a story to you. But to me, as I recall it in leisure, it’s a hell of a story! It’s a story with meaning only to me. Which is fine.
In case you’re wondering, I got to the car a little before sunset. Hours late but I hadn’t been forced to paddle by moonlight. I strapped the canoe on the roof, drove home basking in the dash heat, and slept like a log all night and most of the next day.
The outcome was as it should be. Life without struggle does not grow humans of character.
Why am I telling you this? Because the headwinds in modern life are similar. If you let them, they’ll sand you down to nothing. Yet it’s all smoke and mirrors. In the end all you have to do is keep paddling. I’ll get where I’m going. You will too. The only way to fail is to quit; when you quit, you join the losers. Then you have a new destination in life. You’ll lie on a couch watching CNN until you die.
You know people to whom it has happened. You know what I’m talking about. There’s a throng of losers standing on the shore crying into the wind. They’ll never get to the car. They’ve given up. Through their surrender they’ve become lesser beings.
Take heart! Shit’s not so bad. The power grid is still up. Inflation sucks but the stores are still open. It could get worse, and it may, but all we need to do is persevere.
The armor of oligarchy is fake and limited. They’re terrorized of normal people having a good solid laugh at their expense. Who hasn’t enjoyed mocking the establishment’s gay beer marketing. Woke systems intend to kick us in the balls but they can’t even make a decent movie. People who do fake things collapse in the light of reality. I’m legally nudged to call our current drooling moron the most popular candidate to ever exist. All the gestapo in the world can’t stop me from laughing when he’s planning trains across the pacific or telling obvious barstool stories about bravely being a teenage lifeguard in deadly dangerous Delaware. (I love the Corn Pop story!)
I’ve come to see that God gives us clues to bolster our spirit. He makes oppressors ridiculous as a wink to us normal folk. (If you’re of the other side of the political spectrum, have no fear. God threw you a bone too! Who is more ridiculous than bombastic Orange Man? Your arch nemesis is a dipshit from reality TV.)
Progress is slow but solid. We’re finding out that everything is just as we perceived through our lens of rationality. The green haired shrieking harpy on TicTok is just as mentally unbalanced as we’d deduced. Who cares what someone thinks when they can’t even manage themselves. We breathe a sign of relieve when we realize their bitching is beneath our consideration.
I’ll give just one example among many. Remember the middle of the Covid freak-out when things were at their lowest? Remember how everyone in every media outlet said you were an idiot? Surprise! It turns out you’re not!
All of your “conspiracy theories” have been proven true. Temporarily suppressed evidence emerges to support everything you suspected. Covid really did come from a laboratory and not the laughable coverstory of a bat sandwich. As you immediately surmised, the lab wasn’t doing benign things. As you guessed, that duplicitous elf Fauchi knew all about it. The death threat was just as minimal as you estimated from observing the Ruby Princess cruise ship in April 2020. The pointless freak-out was just as ineffective yet damaging as you thought. Closed schools, closed stores, closed minds… all cost dearly, just as you thought it would. Masks and tape marked lines on floors were just as dumb as you suspected. The vaccine was just as untested as you knew. They tried to shove a shot up your ass and you thought “since when do you need to beat people to death to get them to avoid a true plague”? Sure enough the shot increases your odds of getting sick. Because of course it does!
You suspected all this from day one and you were right from day one. You rode out a world class mind-fuck! All the bitches on F***book can’t change the fact that you’re perfectly happy. You never took the experimental shot, you don’t wear a mask while alone, and you didn’t become a cowering shut-in. As the event fades you’ve slowly verified that every damn thing you suspected was true. It only took a few years to know for sure! The truth percolated past their wall of bullshit.
The lesson is that everything that sounded like a lie was a lie.
Well done! You paddled your ass through the windstorm. You got to your destination. It wasn’t easy. There were sacrifices. When the whole world goes to shit, the hope of an easy life is eroded. But you got to there. You did it on your own too. The world screamed at you to quit; join the vast herd of weak compliant doormats. You didn’t. You persevered and marched right past the stink of their failure.
Imagine the horror if you’d quit! There are lost souls standing on the shore where you’ve paddled past and are long gone. They’ll never leave. Imagine crying into the wind… forever. Imagine succumbing to their fear that they’d have to stand up and be a rational adult… possibly for the first time in their life. Others spent the time of storms in a frenzy of evil; throwing rocks at your impertinent canoe. They’d gladly ruin your life so it matches their own failure. They’re stuck in an infinite cycle of failure right now. The dumbest of them will continue wearing masks, alone in the car, for decades.
Summer is fleeting. Soon the bastards will attack again. The election will loom and people who hate you will scream at you to do their bidding. We’ll have a year and a half of lies.
After that long slog we’ll get a new chapter in the story. We’ll find out if we have an election or an “election”. After that, nobody knows… but you’d better be ready to keep paddling!
Campaign seasons suck because bullshit annoys the sane.
Now for a positive thought, we get to watch people who can only destroy lose their shit over the Energizer Bunny. Years ago we wondered how far they’d go to “get” Trump. Now we know they can’t stop. Two impeachments and an attempted third… didn’t help them at all. Years of “Russian Collusion” led to evidence that the only person not colluding with Russia turned out to be Trump. We’ve seen State funded and Police protected riots. That may have swayed the “election” but it didn’t take him out. Your money was used to tweak the counting of ballots. Your taxes fund armies of corrupt bastards. There are lawsuits in New York and legal entanglements in Florida. And yet His Orangeness just stands there with his dumb fucking smile and they’re tied in knots.
The one thing they can’t defeat is realty. If Orange Goofball shows up every day and keeps showing up, he keeps existing. If you show up, so do you. Every day you live a happy life is a day the shit flinging spastics haven’t won.
Maybe they will find some way to keep him off the ballot. Maybe they’ll win an “election”. Perhaps our incoherent dementia addled “leader” and his equally dim affirmative action bimbo will count more ballots than any other candidate in history even more. The future is unknown but none of us rule out 120% turnout in specially important locations at 3:00 am.
Will that prove they’re meritorious? Will that make them right? Nope! It’ll just mean a few more miles of me paddling past fuckwits standing on shore screaming hatred.
When the wind had me feeling most disheartened I made a realization… despair was pointless. I chucked the whole idea overboard and tightened my grip on the paddle. I was going to keep at it. I wasn’t going to stop. One way or another I was going to get where I was meant to be. God wanted me to know that.
Trump doesn’t give up either. He knew he’d be attacked. He knew he’d be sued. We all know prosecutors would concoct novel legal theories and implement them in corrupt locations. He could have sat on his ass in a gold plated mansion and what… faded out? He didn’t so they “had” to indict an Orange Ham Sandwich. So now what? Did they “win”? Nope. Their Orange Nemesis hasn’t given up so they’ve got to keep spending their lives inventing attack routines. Trump knew what was coming but he didn’t wimp out. I’m impressed!
Even if they burn the world in a frenzy (and they might succeed with that in Ukraine), it won’t eliminate people they can’t stand. He’s there. We are too. If they corrupt the process until Trump collapses… they still fail. If you “win” as a lying, cheating, shitweasel you didn’t win a damn thing. Even if Trump is Epsteined, another will take his place. The only way for reality based adults to fail is to give up.
He’s not giving up, we’re not giving up, reality isn’t giving up and the truth remains true no matter how hard you wish otherwise. They’re losing their damn minds over it.
Fools standing on the shore demonstrating their victimhood failed in their personal journey. Not my problem. I just plain don’t care about someone else’s politically expedient, fashionably current, flavor of loser.
It’s a good feeling to ignore them. I’d like an easier trip but don’t we all? A sane society was nice but I suppose it’s over and that’s ok. I never needed much society anyway.
If the upcoming campaign gets too toxic, listen up Atlas, shrug it off. Take a step back. Recalibrate your sense of scale. Notice the love of your fellow man or the beauty of a sunset, go fishing or get a puppy; politics is a mere side show to a fully centered person.
Those who would oppose us have nothing but fake headlines and censored internet. Turn off the TV. Turn off your cell phone. Use caution regarding your engagement with the internet (including, if necessary, me). Ride a bike, take a hike, hug your wife, stop and smell the roses… don’t let people who can’t manage their own life screw up yours.
Live happily on earth. Evil losers stomping their soft little feet in a self inflicted cyberspace tantrum are beneath you!
I’m going camping soon; a nice break for a hard working fellow who’s earned it. I hope you can take a break too.
I’m going to be fine. You’ll be fine too.