Influencers

Influencers crack me up and make me want to vomit at the same time. At four years old I became aware of something called the communist threat and began absorbing information about their perceived plans to dominate the world. None of it rattled me much because by then Joseph McCarthy's downfall was history and discussions overheard from adults about the bullshit wildly slung by that infamous "influencer" convinced me the commies were not everywhere doing everything they could to take over the free world. Then I began hearing about Vietnam and how imperative it was to stop the communists from taking that country.

At age nine I watched an episode aired on 60 minutes with my parents where Morely Safer was reporting from Cam Ne and began gaining better understanding of what was really going on in Vietnam, a place I was destined to be fighting against communism someday in my not too distant future as I rapidly approached draft age and selective service became a lottery. That's when I began despising LBJ and General Westmoreland for making my future a dead end. A few years later when the Pentagon Papers were exposed, my dislike solidified.

I began hitchhiking to find out how I might make a dash from a hog farm near the southern tip of Lake Michigan up into Canada where I could fade into wilderness to live long and free. I never had a chance to try before Nixon finally stopped sending people to die in Vietnam, one year before I registered for the draft. Feeling better about life, but a bit guilty about dodging that bullet, I explored opportunities to enlist and found they were not a good path.

Today, as U.S. military forces are haphazardly leveraged by a convicted felon pretending to lead the nation for nothing more than raw, unadulterated self-glorification and personal gain, I find myself pondering what to do with the remainder of my life and where to go do it.

As much as I despise those currently controlling this nation, I still think it's worth preserving as a democracy, so I'll stick around to vote this batch of lousy influencers out of office ASAP.