No Matter How Cynical I Get

I can’t keep up.

Damn good thing I still have some remnants of my sense of humor. And, as it turns out, thank heaven for comedians like Lily Tomlin who can put our anger into some kind of perspective.

I don’t remember ever hearing this line until my Tai Chi instructor told me my rants on teenage violence reminded him of that. Specifically, I was suggesting that I was afraid that I was becoming my father, ranting about a society that seems to be headed down the wrong path.

More specifically, I was outraged by the story of the teen girls, and guys, I guess, who had beat up another girl and then put the tape on U-Tube. When I told this to Leslie she thought I must have been referring to an earlier incident where kids were on trial for a very similar incident.

Now, I can understand why criminal gangs have such rites of initiation as a means of making sure that no one will turn on fellow gang members and, you hope, that law enforcement officials wouldn’t be able to infiltrate their gang. But these kids seemed to be normal, successful teenagers, including a cheerleader who fretted that she might miss cheerleading practice while being booked in the local jail.

Nor have I been pleased with recent events in the Democratic primary. I’ve gone from believing either candidate would be a great replacement for the Worst President in the History of America to wishing that we could start over and find a third candidate who is better than our present choices. I’m afraid we’re quickly reaching the point where I will end up once again voting against one of the candidates rather than voting for someone I want to see elected.

Of course, the fact that I spent much of the day trying to learn how to write CSS code that will compensate for Internet Explorer’s deficiencies, past and present, did not put me in a very good mood. Now I know why Lisa said, “I hate IE,” and why Shelley wrote a long blog entry explaining why the web community should not tolerate Microsoft’s attempts to make the web conform to THEIR standards rather than meeting standards established by the web itself.