For the time being, this is my last blog.
Wait. Hold your enthusiastic applause. Curb your enthusiasm. Get up off your knees as you thank the Almighty for answering your prayers.
After five years of pretty much continuous writing, I just need a break, some time off to recharge the batteries.
That might have been necessary and a good idea anyway, but the more or less unrelenting dark news cycles of the last year sealed the deal for me. I just need to get away from it all.
It’s not just the uptick in domestic and international terrorism. It’s not just the police shootings and the shootings of police. It’s not just Donald Trump. It’s the fact that my country and my world can’t seem to take up what seem to me to be such self-apparent solutions.
The biggest challenge to the world is climate change. While it’s too late to solve that problem, we can lessen its harm by dramatically reducing the burning of fossil fuels, not just to the benefit of the environment, but for the good of our economies as well. Never mind. The Republicans just nominated a man who doesn’t even accept the reality of climate change. This is exactly the same as nominating someone who insists that the world is flat. Hillary Clinton gets it, but her chances of actually doing anything meaningful about it will be blocked by an absolutely bat-shit crazy Republican Congress.
The second biggest problem for humankind is income inequality. The 62 individual richest people on earth control as much wealth as the bottom 3.2 billion people. It’s clear enough to me that the craziness we’re witnessing from ISIS and right wing-nuts here in America would be drastically reduced, if not eliminated, if people knew that hard work equaled some significant measure of personal security and comfort. Sure, racism and xenophobia live dormant in the human soul like a noxious weed. But it’s injustice that nurtures those things and makes the weeds grow tall.
You’d think that those 62 people might figure out that if they just spread the wealth around a little, they’d live in a safer, better world while still continuing to be fabulously well off; that maybe they could build the walls surrounding their compounds a little lower and save on security guards. The answer — a more fair distribution of the world’s riches — is so painfully obvious. And yet nothing happens. Why are so many wealthy folks so insistent that they must keep every last penny of their riches? What’s that about?
I might spend the next month contemplating these questions. More likely I’ll just check out. Do my job trying to improve bicycling in Wisconsin. Work on my golf game. Try to figure out where the trout are and how to fool them. Ride my bicycle for miles on end. And I’ll think about golf and trout and bicycles.
A large part of me wants to retreat, to disengage and to disappear; to do what little I can in my own small world and to just leave it at that. Well, at least for the month of August, that’s where I’ll be.
In the end, I want to be more like the French. Have a couple of glasses of wine at lunch. Ride high-speed rail. Refuse to acknowledge that I understand English. Take August off.
See you after Labor Day.
