A professor killing three colleagues in Alabama during a faculty meeting.
A software engineer / bass guitarist flying a plane into an IRS building in Austin.
A California man bulldozing his foreclosed home. (He never missed a payment, the bank just decided to seize the property anyway.)
The John Birch Society co-sponsoring a national meeting of conservatives — with far too many people thinking this is a good idea.
An accomplished young actress with Down’s Syndrome counseling Sarah Palin to get a sense of humor.
Al Haig suddenly looking like a bastion of governmental stability lost to the ages.
Oh, and the apology of a philandering athlete played repeatedly on every channel in the nation at all hours of the day.
Please, tell me how the last ten days could have been any stranger?
When I was about ten years old, I read a small article in one of our regional newspapers predicting the world would end the next day. In some distress, I took the item to my father. He read it, looked at me with that grin of his I miss so deeply, and said, “Well, Shorty, if it is going to end, there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?”
Papa could get ticked off about national and world affairs, but he had a peculiarly serene sense of perspective about them at the same time. I have always believed that was the by-product of spending two years of his life in North Africa and Italy getting shot at every day by German fighter planes. He often said he never expected to see his 21st birthday and everthing that came after was just gravy.
My maternal grandfather refused to discuss politics, a stance to which I try to adhere. As a respected leader in his community, people frequently asked for whom he had cast his vote. His standard answer was, “For the right man.” I have a pretty good idea that he didn’t vote for FDR, but in truth, Grandpa Babe took the answer to that question to the grave with him.
I wish I could talk to either of those two men today about the simmering anger and frustration that permeates our land. They both lived through the conservative backlash to the New Deal when the likes of Father Charles Coughlin filled the radio waves with anti-Semitic vitriol, even expressing sympathy and support for Hitler and the Nazis.
I suspect both my father and my grandfather would tell me our nation has survived such rhetoric and such times before. My grandfather was raised by a woman who never got over mourning the loss of her southern family’s fortunes in the Civil War. My father often repeated Depression-Era wisdom told to him by his grandfather, a simple woodworker with far too many children to feed.
Because I can do nothing about the track on which our country appears to be set, I pay attention to the road in front of me. I put my head down and do what needs to be done in my world. But what really disturbs me is that while I deplore the tactics of some of those folks I mentioned at the top of this post, there is also a part of me that understands.