Elvis Ate Dynamite

Quite a stressful weekend, huh?

I’m not going to delve into all the political implications of what happened Saturday night, nor am I going to jump to conclusions about what did or didn’t happen. If you’ve spent any time on social media over the past 24 hours or so, you’ve likely seen every possible angle, and, frankly, I’ve got nothing to add.

I will say this, though. I’ve lived through a lot of bad things in my life. As a kid, I saw images of Vietnam on the nightly news. I was just shy of six years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I grew up with the fear that my older brothers would get drafted. I remember Kent State like it was yesterday. And all of that happened before I reached middle school. But despite all that, and everything that’s happened since, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like what we’re living through now.

It’s not that we haven’t been worse in the past; of course we have. Some people argue that where we are today is the natural result of all our broken promises. What else did we expect if we failed, time after time, to live up to our own values. And maybe they’re right.

Still, despite 250 years of broken promises, I’ve seen some progress in my day, albeit halting and uneven. What I haven’t seen is the kind of regression we’ve experienced over the past 10 years. It’s been a decade not of broken promises but of outright reversal of progress.

And yet, we all had to roll out of bed and face the start of the new week. It seems almost callous to go about the day like everything is normal when everything is anything but normal. But here we are.

The fact is, we can’t fight everything every single day of our lives. We can’t shoulder that burden every instant of every day. Some days, we just have to breathe.

I hope you have a chance to do that today.

We all have our own ways of coping. Me? I’m going to make some time to pick up the guitar and bang out a few Clash songs, which is one way I deal with all this stress. It gives me some space to breathe.

And it reminds me that good people have always been out there, fighting to make the world a better place. Find some joy and positivity in that. Breathe. Then get back into the fight.