There’s the common kind, of course, genetically insinuated by thousands of years of shared DNA and then there’s the conditioned sort, lessons tacitly or otherwise handed down from parents and other authoritarian family members; expectations for fitting in to pre- and post-adolescent social interactions; and the pedantic beratings of secular and parochial instructors demanding selective moral correctness.  Together, they have kept us loosely in check from annihilating one another and everything worthwhile on our fragile planet…but, just barely.  I choose to believe, with absolutely no empirical evidence, that being more connected, more educated, more aware of one another has made us more decent than our less informed and suspicious forbearers.  While we have cultivated an enumerable laundry list of our differences, both physical and ideological, and have borne witness to the exploitation of those differences to promote frenzied displays of bad behavior from time to time, on the whole, in my lifetime, tolerance and acceptance has always seemed to outweigh the alternative.  So, what happened?  Have I been drinking the Kool-Aid© all this time?  I mean, the President of the United States of America, the most powerful office in the free world, ranks among the most indecent public figures…ever…and he has surrounded himself with advisors and spokespeople as morally bankrupt as himself.  The shameful Republican Congress that is marching in unified goosestep to rubber stamp his cadre of despicable co-dependents has shown itself, (with two inconsequential exceptions), to be without conscience or sense of responsibility to the offices to which they were elected.  Again…what the hell happened?

Oh…and fuck Tom Brady and Bill Belichick and all of those deflated-balled-Trump-loving Patriots!