First, it’s important that you articulate the title as intended, so you catch my drift.  If you start fully erect, and virtually crumple like a deflating balloon, exhaling 100% of the air in your lungs as you form the sounds inside a guttural whoosh until you are left teetering like a centenarian barely winning the upright battle with gravity…that would be close.

What a troubling species. It’s impossible, of course, to suspend one’s cultivated moral code when confronted with polar opposite challenges of others seeing your black as white or vice versa.  And, we humans don’t merely find such dichotomy perplexing, no…we get pissed off.  Some of us…really, really pissed off.  We’re certainly not going to magically discover a unifying thread that evolution, (if you can wrap your head around that whacky concept), or the genetic lottery of geographical or socio-economic happenstance has hidden, to lead us to a universal hug-a-round, Kumbaya moment.  Our wonderful, large-brain, self-determining rise to the top of the food chain is littered with man-made bullshit that has honed our differences into tribal posturing and has led to the slaughter of millions and aimed humanity, laser-focused, toward much, much worse.  To be sure, an Invisible Fence® of religious dogma has cultivated the most profound and lethal separation.  Faith, the unsubstantiated belief that my god is better than your god who’s not really a god because there’s only one and he’s mine, leaves no wiggle room for any negotiation other than capitulation.  So, death to you infidels…even if it takes two or three thousand years to rid the planet of your heresy.

I may have gotten too dark, too soon.

Day to day, in my Quixotic quest to find some light at the end of any tunnel, or poking through the seemingly never-ending rain clouds, I don’t dwell on the insurmountable fuckifaction caused by millennia of bad choices.  But, I am constantly looking for the answer to how people, (you can do that whole exhale thing again for emphasis), who, when individually quizzed, have similar views of wrong and right, good and bad, yet still end up following Hitler and Pol Pot and Pinochet and Putin, (fuck…did I just discover some dastardly ‘P’ thing?), and Donald J. TrumP, (I think I did)?  When I thumb through the annals of the world’s most vile people, (do it again!), the henchmen, Goering, Himmler, Bormann, seem purely and unapologetically evil and, though I don’t in any way compare anything to the horror of the Holocaust, I see in their eyes the same furtive, go-fuck-yourself vacuousness that I glaringly see from Barr and Mitchell and Graham and our soulless President, and I say to myself, “Who are the people, (last time, promise), who go, yeah…I’m with them?”