The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I have it on good report that the happiest people are us old people. If that is true, the youngsters must be miserable as hell, burdened by anxieties of global warming, AI Apocalypse, Gaza, Ukraine, pandemics, income inequality, not to mention the upcoming elections they see as the last gasp of Old White Guy Geezers engaged in political warfare. Kind of puts a cold blanket on breakfast every morning, I bet.

When I was young and foolish, I lived with a lot of anxiety. Bad marriage, bad jobs, bad apartments, crummy cars. Viet Nam, Nixon, Civil Rights, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The future, what little I could conjure, didn’t seem bright. Throw in the Bomb, Cuban Missile Crisis, we all had the nuclear jitters to boot, the very real possibility of the end of mankind as we knew it, one dystopian nightmare after another. Maybe we all have to create our bogeymen then learn to live through it.

Course now we have all this existential angst to contend with, climate change going to end civilization, Trump going to end democracy, new diseases going to finish off what Covid couldn’t, the world gone mad! China ascendant, Russia back to the Cold War, social media making zombies of our kids, the Middle East about to erupt, immigrants pouring in over every border, not just here but everywhere. Droughts, famine, plagues and pestilence! Lions, tigers and bears, oh no!

But maybe, who knows, the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket just yet. I know, some evangelicals wish it would, Second Coming, good times right after the Apocalypse, signs everywhere if you have the right kind of eyeglasses and a few Bible verses to consult. I sometimes think we manifest what we believe, call it my own brand of hocus pocus. Maybe we create reality, not the other way around. Why not? Meaning, at least in my cosmology, better to be optimistic and a much safer bet to think positively. If I’m wrong, tell me after the End Times, why don’tcha. Meanwhile, stay calm and carry on.

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