Another political rant of an aging Boomer

Summer is here, we are hanging out with friends down near the beach. Lots of eating and drinking and loose talk.  The men, who are drunker than the women, begin to pontificate about the state of the world and what could have, should have been done.  The women shrug us off like they did our children when they were five years-old and hungry.

Eventually someone asks me, as an aging therapist, about my view of human nature, and I reply somewhat cryptically that I realize that I have become just "one of the many here among us." Now, I do not expect many of you to immediately get that somewhat poetic allusion, although I'm sure that several of you who thought they should have been at Woodstock may pick up on it.  There is a good chance my son will recognize what I'm talking about, and perhaps my daughter.

But it is true.  After all these years of working with people, and all of these years of observing American politics, and the politics of the whole world, that was the best I could come up with.

I remember when I was not that way, when I believed that people shared an underlying sense of values, that most religions were similar, that science was really the search for the truth, that people recognized the folly of war, and that technology would spread knowledge and that knowledge would lead to enlightenment.

It was very helpful and comforting to believe that, although at times it became kind of confusing and a bit disheartening.

Now my views have been changed by my experiences of seeing close up not only what societies will do to their own people, but what husbands and wives do to each other, and worse, what they do to their children.  I have also read lots of studies that show how totally irrational we are, such as the one done recently at MIT, that shows if you read someone's resume on a heavy clipboard, you will be more impressed with it than if you read it on a lighter weight clipboard.

Once you believe that, and I do.  Then what can you say about human nature.

Therefore, I am now just one of the "many here among us who think that life is but a joke."
(B.Dylan, All Along the Watchtower)

If 250 years of democracy produces Sarah Palin as a viable political force, isn't that a good joke.

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing.  Jokes are good.  It is healthy to laugh. Studies have shown that too.