The Sun Comes Out Again

I have been absent from these pages for a long time now, There are good reasons, and there are bad. The good reasons are that I have been visiting with Sofia, my granddaughter, and my beautiful daughter Mishi at my home in California, FOR TWO GLORIOUS WEEKS!! and I have also put the finishing touches on an acting book (one in progress for forty years!) The bad reason is that I am overwhelmed with thoughts and ideas...too many. I read the newspapers every day and they infuriate me on some primitive level. The articles are often false, which is fine on one level--everyone has a right to their opinion--but that falseness is corrosive in another respect: the absence of ANY truth seeking commonness. I like an argument as well as the next person, but there must be some adjudicator, some judge and jury, some standard to measure the validity of our internecine public battles. There seems to be no sense of intellectual shame any longer. Shame in public discourse used to serve as guilt does in private matters, as the glue that binds the divided heart. It is gone, replaced by self-righteousness and ignorant certainty. The Right and Left are both on the edge of their own cliff, threatening to careen arrogantly to their own certain shoals below. Power, and entitlement, seems to be the only rallying cry, the only element we as a disintegrating culture all assent to: I, me, my and mine seem to be the only pronouns still operative and valued; you and yours, much less we and ours seems banished to an ancient time, a time when civility, the search for truth and a sense of common quest and purpose united us. There is no United States any longer; no boundaries to our self-centeredness. There is no common pie any longer, just a million pieces grasping greedily to devour themselves and grow larger. Language has lost its purpose to define and create agreement; it now is used to obfuscate and cheat. Words are omitted from a sentence to shade the truth into self-fulfilling argument; language is debased; twitter, the vocabulary of twits, rules the shorthand world of supposed communication, to let everyone know who I am and what I'm doing, be it ever banal and self-posturing. Citizen has become resident; duty, obligation, and love of country has become words of derision; gender, like nation, refuses to accept any boundaries or rules; we fight each other to support our individual specialness without blinding ourselves to our common humanity.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, and for me, spilling out with disappointment and sadness, my wife has entered the room and told me the sun is shining and we should go to the beach for a picnic. I heartily agree. I love the sun. I love the beach. I love picnics, I love my wife. I love you. I love God and country. And I certainly don't want to debate whether these latter two are real or simply figments of our imagination.

The sun is shining and I am writing this blog again.