Vote, damn it, or face the end

Like you, like everyone, I am increasingly concerned about where we are headed as a society and a nation. Let’s consider the situation, shall we? We are in the middle of a pandemic, we are on the verge of a serious recession if not an outright depression, we have a president who is irresponsible and ineffective (except in so far as he can wreck the accomplishments of others), we have millions of deplorables who are heavily armed and eager to use their weapons on someone...and, oh, yes, we have enemies both foreign and domestic who are eager to flood the air waves and internet with rumors, falsehoods, and slanders. 

I fear that unless we are very lucky, it is all too likely that we will have serious civil unrest on our hands in the all too near future.

The Future With Trump

The question is what do we do about it? The only thing I can think of is for us all to vote Trump out of the White House...and then stand ready to defend the results of that election from a GOP which looks increasingly like a criminal or fascistic organization, and from Trump supporters who may go into the streets caressing their beloved automatic weapons.

Which means...

That right now the very worst thing any of us can do...the worst!...is to decide not to vote for Biden. If any of us says we “just can’t support him” because a “lesser evil is still an evil,” or because he isn’t Bernie, or because those sexual harassment claims are almost certainly false but “you just can’t be too sure...” or a hundred other reasons, then we actively support Trump’s return to the White House.

And the results of that...

Are too horrible to consider.

***

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Perfection and death

December 16, 2018



So, the other day, I was thinking about my own aspirations and ambitions. Not just the ones I’ve got at the moment, but the ones I’ve had at various times over the course of my life.

Some of them I’ve realized. I successfully married and have been, well, I think, a passable if not perfect husband. I think I’ve been an acceptable father. And so on.

There are, of course, though, things which I have not achieved, and which, frankly, I never will. For example, when I was single I was not as sexually successful as I would have hoped. I was never athletic, nor tall and commanding. I was never a business success, nor have I won fame and fortune.

Naturally, I regret my failure to achieve these things. Indeed, my sense of self-worth has suffered because of it.

And yet, as I was thinking about it the other day, I was struck by how my aspirations were at variance with my identity. At its simplest, I cannot be taller and stronger without fundamentally and forever altering my appearance. And, then, on a deeper level, I couldn’t be a business titan, say, a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg, without changing my interests and talents. I would have to be somehow fascinated by profit and loss, and competition in market—things which, at the moment, don’t appeal to me at all.

In fact, I wonder if, to achieve all of that, I’d have to be another person entirely—someone else, in effect. Someone who wasn’t Michael Jay Tucker. Maybe, indeed, someone I didn’t like particularly.

All of which is to say, well, I wonder about ambitions. Oh, they’re good and important to have. I value them in myself and in others.

But I fear, too, that if indulged too much…

They tend toward a kind of annihilation…a murder of self…

Akin to suicide, and oblivion.

The Very Young Therapist

On why you should never play the martyr card...

August 1, 2015

I return to video blogging...