Living On the Edge

 IT IS A TOSS UP which is the more reprehensible, Donald Trump, or we the American people. First, Trump. the Russians have invaded the United States, cyberly, and are still apparently in the process of stealing every bit of information from very computer in America, including all the cute pictures of your puppies, kittens, and baby brothers. That, plus all the proprietary information contained in government and corporate computer systems. The Russians will have walked off with everything in the house, and Trump, serving as Putin's errand boy as per usual, racist as always, blames the Chinese. The fact that the United States does the very same thing to Russian and every other country in the world, that every country does it to every other country, and that every human being on the planet steals whatever it can from every other human being notwithstanding.Perhaps the day will come when we discover what horrible blackmail material Putin hangs over Trump's head, like a sword of Damacles. Something to do with pissing on prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, perhaps. We the American people are less concerned about and with Russian perfidy, and much more concerned with satisfying our every hedonistic urge. A dear friend of mine recently lamented that the pandemic has prevented her from going shopping and taking her own sweet time while being about it. I nearly bit my tongue off refraining from reminding her that there will soon be nearly half a million Americans who are no longer able to worry about leisurely shopping, nor anything else. At any rate she already knew that. It seems that many if not most Americans can empathize with my shopping deprived friend. Roughly eighty five millions of us were expected to take to the skies and highways over the holidays, some with, and some without masks and social distancing. These people must either be oblivious to the carnage all around them, vaccinated, like living on the edge, or are irresistibly impelled to fly to the bosoms of far flung friends and family, like salmon swimming upstream to mate. We hop they all make it back healthy, but of course, they won't.