So I turned 55-years old yesterday, and my father turns 83 tomorrow; we had our joint birthdays this weekend overlooking the ocean at my father’s house in Laguna Beach. We tend to do this each year during the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Beyond our birthdays, this annual celebratory weekend heralds the beginning of summer. I always look forward to it.
I was happy to turn 55-years old. It means I am one year closer to retirement: so getting older is a good, not a bad, thing. But it is true as my father tells it: like a roll of toilet paper unfurling, the closer you get to the end the quicker it goes; each year passes faster, and the end seems to get there. My Uncle Bill continues to decline in his Alzheimer’s struggle, and my father’s generation is one year closer to the end. I was particularly happy to see Martha Barich at my birthday party: she broke her hip last month and is super-frail, but she made an appearance at our party. Hurray for her!
In a few short weeks I will submit my grades and be released for the summer. I will have nine weeks completely off.
So what does that mean? What plans might I have?
Well, we will be spending a good chunk of our summer in Costa Rica. And then towards the end of summer we will be with our entire extended family in the Bahamas. I plan on riding my bike hundreds of miles. Tennis and swimming, as always. My daughters are finally old enough where we can truly travel and learn together; and COVID-19 finally has relented and travel is possible. So we are traveling. My daughter and wife will be living with a Costa Rican family for two weeks, totally immersed in the Spanish-language. Four hours of language instruction in the morning, and then cultural activities and hikes in the tropical rainforest, etc. All meals with local food with the locals. How wonderful, eh? Then a few weeks later we will visit Tuvalu, and St. Thomas in the Caribbean Sea on a Disney Cruise with my family, my sister’s family, my brother, and my father. It has been five years since our Alaska Disney Cruise, and it is high time to do it again.
I am looking forward to the summer of 2022.
This is important, because a great/relaxing summer can boomerang us into the Sturm und Drang of another busy/overwhelming academic year which starts in approximately 13 weeks. One daughter will then be in seventh grade, and the other in tenth grade. We will be back in it up to our necks in the fall, but the summer will be different. It is time to re-charge the batteries.
Before attending my birthday party yesterday, I stopped in Westwood and took my older daughter for a lengthy two hour walk all around the UCLA campus and environs. I wanted her to get a deep look at the campus and how it feels, as she approaches the time when she needs to choose where she wants to go to college. There was enormous family history involved as we walked around campus: “This was my off campus apartment when I first got to UCLA.” “That is the fraternity house I lived in later.” “This is the ER I worked in for several years.” “This is the Catholic student association church where your mom and I were married, and the Faculty Club is where we had our wedding reception,” “These inverted fountains are where I proposed to your mother.” They were mostly happy memories I shared, although they reside in the ever receding distant past now.
It was a bit jarring to see that, unlike nearly anywhere else, the UCLA authorities had a mask mandate inside buildings. I did not have a mask with me yesterday while walking around, as almost nobody in California was mandated to wear a mask in May 2022. Luckily for me, about half the UCLA students were also not wearing masks in the student union building, despite the regulations. So I could go in the building unmolested without a mask. The UCLA mask mandate was not really being enforced. I was relieved.
I picked up a copy of The Daily Bruin and read an op-ed by the students demanding the administration bring back mask mandates. In the name of EVERYBODY being protected, EVERYBODY should be FORCED to wear a mask, even as almost all the college students are at very low risk for getting severely sick after mass vaccinations 28 months after the start of the pandemic. It was a typical message of that sort: don’t allow people to make their own decisions – no, force everyone to wear a mask. There is an extreme focus on safety and protection from harm, with a policy of coercion by the authorities – and a demand that the UCLA administration TAKE ACTION NOW to shape the world in the way they want. This was a window into a certain subculture in the United States nowadays demanding CHANGE NOW in what some call a “summer of rage” – in that students DEMAND we do what they want.
You will see activists like the one above this summer. So while I am enjoying my vacation this summer, others will be mobilized to take ACTION in a “summer of rage” to be “agents of change” in one or all of the following –
- Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization; reproductive rights and abortion
- New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen; gun control and firearms law
- COVID, disease mitigation, and public health
- Racial equity and income inequality
- Lack of family leave and calls for increased taxation for welfare state
- Climate-change crisis
- Other crisis of the month
I do not doubt the protesters will be loud and importunate. But I will pay close to zero attention to them. And they will not get most of what they want, and that will enrage them further. They are not proposing or asking. They are DEMANDING.
But life will go on and the world will stumble on, despite their warnings that the world is coming to an end. Next September and then November will be here soon enough, and we shall see what we shall see. The Republicans are predicted to win at least one of the houses of Congress in the midterm elections. How will these UCLA students react to this news? Abortion rights? Gun control? The country continuing to move on from COVID-19? I think these movements will not go well for them over the next few months. There are even moments here and there where I agree with them, but they are such insufferable assholes about it that I hesitate to make common cause with them.
A few further questions: Is “rage” sustainable? Does “rage” persuade anyone to join your cause? Does it change anyone’s mind? Is “loud” a synonym for “effective”? Will life for most Americans be one continuing crisis which consumes them mind-and-soul again and again? Or will they be getting on with their lives?
Because for mature adults life is not a crisis which lasts a few months or years; it is a marathon, and keeping your eye on the long-run is important. Those pussy-hat wearing Trump critics of 2017 and 2020… how will they be doing then? Are they enjoying their lives? The draining anger of political contention, the people who are exhausted and “burnt out” because of COVID and Trump and racism and gun violence and reproductive rights and climate change, etc. The Twitter keyboard “social justice warriors” in a frenzy over “the state of the world.” WAAHHH! You disagree with them and they can hardly believe it. Overturn Roe v. Wade? Outrage!
So let them have their “summer of rage.” Let them shout out into the void. Let them spit into the microphones with anger and sneer at the cameras in protest. The student journalists at The Daily Bruin will vent their spleen in OpEds – they were the same pushy and cocksure blowhards back three decades ago when I was there as they seem to be now. Nobody is paying much attention. It is more noise in a noisy world.
It as if these zealots could not conceive of the idea that others might think differently from them – and have good reasons for why they might do so.
I will ignore them and others of their ilk. I will not be embracing rage these next two months. I will have a different kind of summer, and I and my family should be good-to-go for the 2022-2023 school year.
And we will see who is doing well (or not) in 2024 and 2025.
My experience has almost always been that those who are full of rage proceed to poison themselves with their passion while the object of their hatred barely knows (or cares) that they exist. But we shall see.
Do I use the “them” about these people as if they were really different and separate from “me”? Yes, I do. This shared country of ours – with people in it who don’t have much in common? Yes, that is the case. (I will pursue this theme further in a later posting.)
For now, happy birthday to me (and my father). Life is good.
I will hope the same for you, esteemed reader.
2023 and 2024 will be here before you know it. Then 2025 and 2026.
Know what you are about, and set out to make the most of your time – your precious time. Like a roll of toilet paper, it’s quantity shrinks faster and faster until – before you know it – there is none left. You are out of time. Which means you are out of life.
83-years old tomorrow. 55-years old yesterday.
May the Good Lord preserve and protect both my father and me.
Amen.
What do I always wish for before blowing out the candles on my birthday cake?
“I wish for the happiness of my family.”
That is always my wish.
6 Comments
Rosa Fontana
Happy Birthday to you and your father! As someone in a similar phase of life I enjoy reading your posts.
rjgeib
Thank you.
Jay Canini
To be honest I find the concept mask wearing should be mandatory in June 2022 to be a bit strange. It is clear that N95 masks do a very good job dealing with transmission even if other people are not wearing masks, and one no longer has the high levels of hospitalization that have broken health care systems in the past. I think the UCLA editorial is stuck in the past, so to speak. Mask mandates are no longer necessary.
I think the concern with the Roe v Wade reversal isn’t necessarily abortion itself, but affecting the underlying right to privacy and, more importantly, the balance of power between the urban (liberal) parts of the country and the exurban and rural (conservative) parts. The Supreme Court leak may have been done by a conservative to lock in “votes” from several justices, or to dissipate the said summer of rage early before the polls open this fall. Either way it makes people wonder if the Supreme Court going forward will be protecting rights in the way that the Supreme Court did from the mid-20th century until the early 21st century, and whether a resurgent GOP in 2025 or beyond will try a federal abortion ban or other federal bans such as against gay marriage, against privacy, etc. The gun debate is stuck on the similar fact that power is disproportionately with exurban and rural America.
I think what has changed about politics in 21st Century America is that it’s become increasingly difficult to persuade people from another political side to reason, I think because of the nature of memes and propaganda being beamed in constantly, “locking in” points of view and voters. Barack Obama wrote in The Atlantic that he used to be able to campaign in rural Iowa and convince people there to consider voting for him, but in today’s world so much anti-Democratic propaganda was beamed in that now he’s not able to reach those voters. This means political strategists now have to move to a model where they motivate people in “their own side” to go to the polls instead of staying home. The rural conservative wing of the GOP is already using anger-based appeals to drive loyal voters to vote and had done so since the Tea Party, and the Democrats, now unable to rationally convince a swath voters to defect, have to resort to either using a similar strategy, or getting steamrolled (the “you go high, we go low” dilemma).
There are centrist Dems who would be happy to vote for a Mitt Romney type, but they see the GOP as becoming increasingly so extremist that the candidates in the GOP no longer appeal to them. Indeed a mainstream newspaper editorial stated that they could not recommend any GOP candidates for a certain race. This is increasingly making the Democratic Party a difficult marriage between centrist types and more leftist types who don’t agree in their politics, which is why AOC said that she and Biden would be in different political parties if they were in another country. The error with some of the young keyboard warriors is that they are going against the more moderate faction of the Democratic Party in such a vociferous manner that it could threaten to tear the Democratic Party apart. The young keyboard warriors don’t realize they are in a small minority faction and that it doesn’t help to splinter their broad ideological side.
Additionally the fear of dirty political maneuvers to try to cancel votes from Democratic areas is going to inevitably make Democratic voters constantly unhappy and fearful. There is a plausible situation where a Democratic candidate for president would even win the Electoral College, but that Republican Legislatures, governors, etc. refuse to certify votes favoring Democrats and force a contingent election which would favor the Republican candidate, or both GOP-dominated parts of Congress could choose to refuse to certify a Democratic candidate for president. PA GOP Governor Candidate Doug Mastriano bragged about having the power to nullify votes in his state, for example. This statement does not bode well for American politics. What could come afterward, in the situation above, is then a GOP-dominated trifecta could reinterpret previously held rights so the party could stay in power and that the exurb/rural-dominant minority would dominate over the urban-dominant majority for the foreseeable future. One looks to laws passed by Ron DeSantis in Florida for a preview of what said minority may want to see go national. The GOP refusal to participate in presidential debates going forward and Fox News anchors arguing January 6 was no big deal inevitably is convincing left leaning people that generally the GOP is becoming obstructive.
I think, in sum, that the Summer of Rage is seen as a defensive measure from people on the left to prevent the above happening in 2025: because they feel it is no longer possible to rationally go about “proposing or asking”, because:
* The electoral system is now seriously tilted against the centrist-left coalition (compare to other countries where the urban majorities vote proportionately and feel properly represented).
* A large swathe of voters in the GOP are so in tune with their echo chambers that they won’t hear/see reasonable proposals and requests, let alone consider them if they hear/see the proposals and requests
* Multiple GOP politicians act in bad faith and/or are openly supporting extremism that had come from Trump and Trump-inspired candidates
(On another note I am very happy that Raffensberger won the GOP Primary in Georgia, as it means that the pro-Trump candidate cant get into Georgia’s Secretary of State position and de-certify votes there, and I suspect investigations picked up steam once Raffensberger’s win was official. He then testified to a GA Grand Jury. Maybe if that case moves forward and causes a serious moderation in the GOP, it will be easier for centrists and more moderate left leaning people to disengage from the Summer of Rage).
rjgeib
Wow! Thank you for your lengthy comments, Jay. You are probably right. But you probably spend way more time and attention on politics than I do. Past a certain point, I refuse to give too much to politics on principle.
But I think “summer of rage” is just more of the politics as confrontation, even combat, which we have seen for a long time now in American politics. The extremes on both ends of the political spectrum, as you noted, seem to want to dominate and destroy “the enemy” through fighting. It is an unproductive approach. Little gets done in a system requiring compromise. Grandstanding, speechifying, posturing, crying, pouting, and always fighting.
I am not interested in this fighting. So I am mostly out.
Enjoy your summer, Jay. I surely will.
Jay Canini
You’re welcome! I definitely look forward to the summer.
There was one more interesting article “Everything Is Terrible, But I’m Fine” from The Atlantic which explains that while most Americans are souring on their views of the US’s trajectory (because they pay attention to a flood of political news, more intense than previous generations), they personally believe that their personal household’s situations are improving and that they as individuals feel happy. So there is a paradoxical situation where many Americans want change, but they don’t want change that impacts their personal lives. The author argues that therefore many Americans don’t really want radical change that could impact them.
rjgeib
Yeah, I read that article. After over two years of clumsy government pandemic policies, most Americans want peace and quiet, not change and more contention. That’s my desire. The political activists who obsess about politics are not the majority.