Flaming Torch Juggling

The prevailing wisdom is that we don’t get sent more trouble than we can handle, but who made that up? Not that anything is terribly wrong in my little unimportant, but to me, supremely important, life. As usual, I probably receive more blessings each day than the average National Happiness Index of Bhutan. Like the joyful St. George and the Dragon first play rehearsal with 8^th graders, who grabbed that extravagant, weird and funny play by the tail and whipped it around their heads joyfully, jumping in fearlessly without that typical 8^th grade urge to look cool and not embarrass themselves. In general, they give each other permission to go all out and reward their peers’ efforts with genuine appreciation when they see someone go over the top, but with grace, technique and talent. That should be more than enough to fuel me with happiness and it mostly is.

But let’s face it, no matter how much we genuinely feel some happiness or how much we fake it with our “have a nice day” smile, mostly we’re spending out time juggling flaming torches, using every ounce of our energy to just keep them up in the air without crashing on our heads. And sometimes all it takes is the smallest annoyance or distraction to find our hair on fire from the dropped torch.

Today it was the announcement that Al Franken will step down, urged on by his fellow Democrats. Are they out of their mind??!!! The whole “we go high when they go low” fantasy already crashed on us when American voters made it clear—they prefer low. So I imagine the Republicans and all their right-wing cronies are laughing gleefully at Franken’s moral stance while they keep encouraging pedophile Roy Moore to get into office and keep excusing Trump getting away with everything that others are getting fired for. On top of the over-the-top Garrison Keillor accusation and firing, that inability to distinguish and rank offenses and put what sounded like an innocent mistake on par with Moore’s stalking 14-year olds in shopping centers, trivializes the very foundation of the “me, too” movement. These two things, on top of the pending tax plan, has sent my usually buoyant hope, that the sheer weight of evil will collapse on itself and the good will rise to the top, crashing down. These are not good signs.

Nothing to do but light the torches again and resume juggling.