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Ready for Anything! (?)

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By the time you read this, the Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC) has probably raised their benchmark Fed Funds rate and given guidance for the next few years. More importantly, everyone has freaked out one way or the other and the stock and bond markets have probably done something that has everyone puzzled.

We still live in a financial world that defies expectations. It has to be “experienced”, just like the various things you did in your mis-spent youth that built “character”. The question becomes – what great wisdom are we learning from all of this?

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Charlie Brown Christmas

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Christmas is a time for remembering everything that has come before us. It’s not a kind of memorial day when we remember what we lost, but instead a day to remember the great gifts that have come to us over the many years. The circle of gratitude is widened every year as the holiday expands with new love and new memories.

This is a special Christmas because fifty years ago we received one of the great gifts of television, “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. In many ways this defines the tension of Christmas itself, even though very little in popular culture has been willing to decry the commercialism that is the true “War on Christmas”. And in the process it gave us a new definition of holiday cheer, bringing Vince Guaraldi’s cool jazz into the warm holiday like a sprig of winter itself.

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Crossing the Line

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Anything resembling an actual “election” is still months away. But the circus is running in full (questionable) colors well in advance. There is one candidate who knows a circus – not as the bland ringleader, but as the craziest clown there is.

There’s no value in naming this particular clown because he thrives on hearing his name. That’s probably what this is really all about as narcissistic politics finally crawls up its own backside to die. He was recently dubbed “White ISIS” (Whisis) by the still-excellent Daily Show for his desperate willingness to promote the main goal of ISIS – conflict between the Muslim world and the West. So we’ll use that term.

But that’s less important than the reaction to the big show because somehow Whisis finally crossed the line. That is, there is a line. We found the line!

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As Words Fail

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The conversation among commuting comrades on the 94 bus turned to the San Bernadino shooting. More accurately, it turned toward it and then veered away:

“Can you believe this one?”
“It was like an place where they help developmentally disabled or something.”
“Yeah. That was messed up.”
“Totally.”

Details established, the words trailed off. Anything more was beyond us this Friday morning. The same conversation, more or less, repeated at work:

“They were a husband and wife.”
“Yeah, they had a six month old baby.”
“Unbelievable.”

From there it went nowhere. Where could it go? What was there left to say?

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Violence at the Core

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Another week, another shooting. This one at a Planned Parenthood clinic, leaving three dead. The shooter, as is so often the case, was a white guy – a European-American – who in this case muttered, “No more baby parts” as he was led away. The reports that Planned Parenthood sold aborted fetuses for cash, long proven to be false, may have pushed him over the edge but that may be beside the point.

He was in a murderous state of mind. And that state is remarkably common among people of European descent.

Where we often site “Islamic Extremists” as being particularly violent, history tells us that those of us who come from European stock are much worse. It’s time we confront this problem and stop assigning the characteristic “violent” to others.

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