I'm out of sorts lately. Bleah. Hard to put words to it, exactly. Just a bit off the mark of late, not in the sweet spot. Might need to whip out the dreaded List(tm) and start doing that, just to tick things off my list and get'em done. I hate doing that, but feel like I might need to, just in order to get the stuff done, to know it's done, all of that. I'm already in the "My Lord, it's almost Christmas" frame of mind, and we're in early October. Argh! This year was surreal. Not as dire as past years, but still a trippy kind of year. I got a lot of stuff done, but it's still kind of wild to think of that.
I've been craving biscotti lately, may make some in the next few weeks. I used to have some great recipes for them, but have lost them to the sands of time. So, I grabbed three other recipes I found online that looked good, may make those.
Had this weird, unsettled feeling about the country, too -- like is this how the country felt decades before the Civil War? Like irreconcilable differences of national opinion? Thankfully, Americans are likely far, far too lazy to actually engage in another civil war -- can you imagine that? I keep getting my brain around the notion of evil as "militant ignorance." That just feels so spot-on to me. Militant ignorance -- "Don't know, don't wanna know. And I'll shoot anybody for asking. Love it or leave it. Zero tolerance." And so on. Ugly, empty sentiments. That's what we're up against as a society. America's seen itself toppled from the pinnacle of power -- our generation (Gen X) is entering middle age in the age of America's decline. I read the other day that 40 million Americans are illiterate, and something like 50 million more are functionally illiterate -- ~90 million Americans are illiterate? Holy fucking SHIT. This is a national disgrace, a cultural failure of staggering magnitude. We have over 40 million uninsured, 14 million unemployed (and another 8-10 million marginally employed). And the political class is completely captive to the status quo. Those Occupy Wall Street folks are at least drawing attention to this reality. Our nation is in dire need of forward progress, but is being held hostage by hidebound dullards who keep us spinning in circles because they refuse to actually face reality. I saw that the average American who can read reads at the 7th grade level. That conjures up images of people moving their lips as they read. Our political class is representing people who read at the 7th grade level? That is who they are appealing to? It makes it very clear why things like evolution aren't well-understood by Americans. Or the need for energy policy. Or why we can't cut taxes and fight three wars and have a social safety net and raise revenue at the same time. And so on. Lordy. We dumb. I mean, really, it was only Sputnik scaring the shit out of the American political class that spurred the teaching of science in this country. Look at where we were before Sputnik, and you'll see that ignorance is really the steady state in American culture. The push for high-tech in the latter 20th Century may, in retrospect, have been just a hiccup. Just like the middle class (which was made possible by the GI Bill, that swelling of soldiers coming back from wars and taking advantage of that to educate themselves). The American middle class is gone. Whether people realize it or not, it's true. It eroded over the past 30 years, and it's gone today. That's the economic reality of it. The political reality of it is only now sinking in, I think. A lot of people with 7th grade reading comprehension are gonna be pissed off. Pitchforks and torches. Meanwhile, I try to equip my boys with knowledge and the emotional tools they need to thrive -- to help them face challenges without fear, to feel hope and promise in the future -- even as I think at some point they'll leave this country one day, because the opportunities will be elsewhere. In a globalized economy, allegiance to nation-state is a quaint relic -- so very 20th century.
