I’m glad you liked the poem.

I think the now common need to react personally to every single thing you can’t influence or control is a serious illness. Of course, it’s also cheap egotism. Take a tsunami and make it about you. But it also devalues the often heroic lives and everyday struggles of ordinary people in unknown places, whom are just doing the best they can, who will never be celebrities in this culture where you are a celebrity or you are nothing.

Political correctness is now endemic. It infects all discourse, left or right. It’s a way of trying to control behavior through language, demanding that you use the approved words or be silenced or, if not silenced, excluded and marginalized, kicked out of the tribe. I like it outside of the tribe.

I learned about detached compassion in Vietnam. As a medic, if I had made every casualty’s pain my own, I couldn’t have worked. My selfish weeping would have caused people to die. Of course, I felt for the wounded, but it was never about me. They were the ones bleeding and dying. I had a job to do. I tried to do it.

As I have had to tell my oldest son, it’s a good thing to have opinions, but it isn’t necessary to shout them out and demand that you are right. At the moment, it seems as if too many people are shouting and demanding. In the next breath they lament the loss of civility. Then they go back to shouting and demanding. The current level of noise in America makes it difficult to think and nearly impossible to be heard.

Such is the world we live in. I don’t claim that I understand all that’s happening, but I have a visceral sense that we aren’t headed anywhere good. Time will tell.

I have to say, I don’t consider myself depressing or depressed. The poems are just snapshots taken from various perspectives, trying out different realities and persona.

In real life, I am as fun as a multitude of monkeys.

Good to hear from you. At some point. Medium pulled some trigger and all the people I used to read just vanished.

Keep hammering.