How to fight The Big Despair

Confusion, chaos, fear, anger and depression are the vital ingredients in the time-tested recipe for Dictator Suckertash that’s now being cooked up in our country. Now what? This!

John, Glad to see you are writing again. I missed your voice [a kind reader wrote to me].

My question is how to keep from despair? After the debate last week and a few supreme court decisions, it appears we shall soon have an insane king of our country. I fear the establishment of a Gilead, where women, blacks, and LGBTQ people lose all their rights.

Part of me wants to take to the streets, fighting and screaming until I drop. And part of me wants to move to Costa Rica and bury my head in the sand.

Meanwhile, dear members of my family have fallen on hard times. Also, I recently entered the wild world of online dating--where the last person I briefly dated told me he could not be involved with me because I had had a happy marriage (?!)

Just wondering how to walk the line between giving up and fighting the fight.

Yeah, I mean, the despair is real these days. And all the stuff that’s going wrong in our personal lives is only exacerbated by this constant low-grade buzzing (or full-on screaming) of everything that is going so terribly, terribly wrong in the world writ large every second of every day.

Of course, you are someone who’s had a happy marriage. So I just don’t know if I can take you seriously.

Har! Kidding! But you knew that.

Ooof. Online dating. Or really just dating. It’s like going on an audition at the same time you’re auditioning someone else for a role in a play that hasn’t been written yet. It’s basically insane. Mating is insane. Everyone should live alone forever.

Now . . . what were we talking about? Oh, right: about how, if we don’t properly manage our stress, we might just go out one morning, just to check our mail, and see an actual upside-down flag flying on one of our neighbors lawns, and the next thing we know we’re trying to sneak attack their whole house by climbing down their chimney, which we don’t even come close to fitting down, and then we’re stuck in there where it’s so fucking hot that finally we just start screaming for help and then it’s basically impossible to explain to the cops what happened.

I mean, nothing like that has happened to me yet. But . . . you know. It could.

But, for real, we are certainly living in, shall we say, intense times. America might indeed be well on its way indeed to electing its first king. And should that coronation actually take place, will our Sun Bronzer King have been elected by divine right?

Pfft. Hardly. He’ll have been crowned by our lame-o American right. Which is divine in the way that, say, urine is ambrosia. Which it’s not, except maybe to some particularly repulsive insects.

Anyway, my answer to the question of how to fight The Big Despair right now is this: Don’t despair.

That’s it. Don’t despair. And I mean it. What the Creators of Chaos very much want is for you to despair. That’s what they need if their plan to destroy this country has a chance of succeeding. Would-be despots and despots already in power always, always, always seek, first and foremost, to foster a deep and abiding depression—a grinding and ever-refreshing feeling of purposelessness—throughout the population it seeks to control.

Everyone loves a winner. And there’s nothing that a certain cruel and craven type of “winner” loves more than a loser. And as far as that type of malicious dickwad is concerned, the more losers the better.

So such moral suck holes make losers, by creating a set of conditions that keep people feeling like they can’t possibly win. Confusion, chaos, fear, anger and depression are the vital ingredients in the time-tested recipe for Dictator Suckertash that’s now being cooked up in our country.

But that disgusting dish ain’t been made here yet. And it never will be, as long as enough Americans choose joy over despair, hope over surrender, peace over conflict.

We tend to think that “keep a positive attitude” is functionally or effectively useless. When in fact it’s anything but that. It is, rather, exactly how good people win, first individually, and then en masse.

You show the world—you show yourself—that you’re not despairing. That you believe in the better angels of human nature. That you’re not afraid of assholes whose mission is to make you live a fearful life. That you understand both the eternal and immediate value of a kind word, a thoughtful gesture, a smile given to someone not expecting one.

You live positively, and you spread positivity. And positivity dries up negativity like the sun dries up dog poop. It just works that way.

Look, our country has gone through serious troubles before. As bad as things are right now, it’s not like it was during the Vietnam War. We’re not mired in either of our devastating World Wars. This isn’t the Great Depression. It’s not the Civil War.

This is just some braying, bullying asshole whom a bunch of other assholes are either dumb enough to believe, or self-interested enough to use for their own craven reasons. Okay. That’s not nothing, for sure. But we voted Cretin #1 out of office the first time, and we can easily keep him out of office again.

Vote, work at a grassroots level for the advancement of those things you care about, and stay positive. And never forget that “stay positive” isn’t a vacuous platitude. It’s the most powerful force on earth. Before a joyous attitude the devil himself withdraws. So . . . do that! Be positive! Act positively! Spread positivity! If we all do that, then goodness will certainly win, and evil will retreat back to whatever slimy rock it hides under until it feels that its time has, yet again, arrived.

Let’s start pushing it back under that rock, where it belongs.