I’ll be 75 in two days and I thought I had learned a thing or two along the way.  Turns out, knowing a lot of the questions to Jeopardy answers does not make it so.  The big smarty pants topics remain a total mystery to me.  The meaning of life…what do women want?…love…hatred…mayonnaise…religion…money…royalty…not a clue.  I have a decades-long morning routine, usually completed long before anyone else is stirring, of reading the NY Times, virtually cover-to-cover, then cleaning my palate with an obsessive completion of the daily crossword before allowing the previously only read articles to leak into my psyche.  Then, aside from my current 141-day solving streak, I feel like an idiot.  What’s happening?  Who are these soulless people getting so much press for trying to tear down everything good and righteous?  And why, if those of us who care about each other and our planet are truly the majority, do the bad kids always seem to seize the day?  These Trumps and Carlsons and McConnells and Stefaniks and Grahams and all the fucking Republicans and Fox News crazies and those Koch assholes…why do they get a say in anything?  They are the shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater exception to the First Amendment and if there are more of us than them, we need to make them sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up!  An Arizona recount by a toothless brigade of QAnon lunatics…how can that even be a thing?  49 states pushing anti-democracy voter legislation?  Trump?  I mean, really…Trump?  Huh?