Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Unpopular Thoughts

As said recently by some ex-president: 'It takes great courage to champion the vulnerable and the sick and the infirm.'

No, it doesn't.  Not at all.  In fact, it generally invites praise, usually immediate praise, for the speaker and signals a superior, if facile, moral position on behalf of those who cheer those words.  That's a rather easy thing to do.

Actually doing something about the vulnerable and the sick and the infirm, bending one's life around addressing such needs, requires great personal industry and a portion of courage, especially as it will never be lucrative nor glamorous.  It's much easier just to talk about it, while wearing your dinner jacket, and receive lazy applause.

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I noted how odd it was lately that politicians have started to curse so frequently in public.  Being a vulgarian is part of the current president's "brand", of course, but I'm more surprised that senior Democratic politicians are doing the same, even more so.  I wondered if it was yet another cynical attempt to engage the lost working class, whom I assume politicians view as a demographic that communicates chiefly through obscenities, as do movie and TV actors when portraying the working class on screen.

Turns out, I was not wrong: Can Democrats cuss their way back to the White House?

Speaking as one who grew up in the working class Midwest, public swearing is viewed as distasteful. There are places where it's expected and tolerated, but not while in the midst of service to the greater community.  The practice is made absurd when it's a privileged, white millionaire wearing an Italian scarf worth roughly what I make in a month deciding to be a public potty mouth.  Yes, I feel real connected to you now, senator.

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I miss tough professional athletes, the ones who used to smoke cigarettes at half-time and come to the playing field with bloodshot eyes.  I find their contemporary incarnations a bit on the whiny side: Raptors would have won series if they had LeBron James

Thing is, Toronto, you don't have him.  Cleveland does.  You have to figure out how to beat him, not lament his existence.