Because I’m weird that way, (you know, trusting that questions have reasonable answers), and because I hold tightly to the absolute belief that either very little or almost everything is a result of happenstance…you can imagine my cathartic sigh of relief when the light bulb flashed in my head, and it all seemed so perfectly clear.

There are no fundamental differencesin the organizing, influencing or governing of families, communities or countries.  Sure, there have always been fancy-shmancy names for the ideology or philosophy or religion and differing rules, permissions and restrictions that accompanied them all…but, the hierarchical layering and motivating raison d’être…nearly identical.  There’s the head guy, king, president, poo-bah, pope, imam and then a small gaggle of beholding cronies, henchmen, cabinet secretaries, cardinals and such, a conscripted street gang, army, band of crusaders or otherwise devoted zealots…and then, everyone else.  The top guys call the shots and sell various formulae of snake oil to the “everyone else”, often requiring the “everyone else” to make the snake oil themselves. The Big Four, Communism/Socialism, (you say, “potato”…), Fascism, Democracy and Religious Fundamentalism all promise their populations of “everyone else” different versions of, “boy, this is going to be so cool!”, advertised as a classless society, a perfectly organized and pure existence, a free and liberated opportunity to seek your own measure of success, or a fast track to a harp-filled afterlife.  Most of us, (although this may be changing soon), will not be immigrants, so our particular snake oil refueling location is simply a matter of gestational dumb luck.  Whether our lot in said environment works positively or negatively for us, (creature comforts sadly range from false euphoria to abject hellhole), it is, at least, tempered by our relatively short life span as celebrated in the prophetic words of Country Joe McDonald, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!”.  While we’re waiting out that inevitability, however, one would think that 10,000 years of societal, industrial and intellectual evolution would have minimally provided us with something more promising than any of the options on the 2018 table.  One would be mistaken.

I apologize if I implied that my aha moment had some positive spin, when, in fact, my realization was that the countries in Africa, South America, Europe and Asia are all equally fucked.  The US of A, now, more than ever, doubly fucked. But maybe, at least for the time being, according to a wise friend, the supplemental, sadly singular forehead-slap solution…”Oh, Canada!”