Deleting The Stress

The other day a doctor told me that I had to eliminate the stress from my life. Aren’t doctors great? Just like that, “you need to have no stress.” I gave him my sincerest “I’m listening” look and let it go. Like there was a switch or something, he tells me this.

I know that he’s right, so I’m going to give it a try. I, probably we all, need to take in the daily deluge of horrifying and dangerous information and somehow not let it find a home in us. Let it hit our receptors and bounce; receive it and catalog it, but don’t warehouse it all. The alternative being death, I’m ready to make a run at learning the bounce.

“Serenity now!” As they said on Seinfeld.

It’s high time that I let go of a few of the personal stressors that have been damaging me big time for the last few years. I know that, and I can feel it happening on its own. Time heals, etc. What about the tsunami of bullshit that reaches us on a daily basis in the news? Trying to avoid all word of happenings in America and the world just would not work for me; that’s a non-starter. I’ll be looking for a new way of accepting the information instead. Trying to find a way to read it all with objectivity, like an alien studying the earth from space. Looking for a way to become aware of it without resorting to constant worrying. It’s not going to be easy.

Because the news is terrible! Here’s a sample of the more-or-less new terrible news just from today:

1.   The American government wants 28,000 new nuclear weapons of all types, including new classes of small nukes that would be small enough not to make much of a mess. Almost as small as the two that we dropped on Japan. The world hardly noticed those! They also want to change the protocols to make it easier to use nuclear weapons;

2.   There is now a person in America named Chicago West. Named after a sign on I-80 I guess;

3.   Our president paid $130,000 for the silence of a hooker/porn-star after a sexual liaison. This payment was made through a shell-corporation by the then candidate’s lawyer, a few weeks before the election;

4.   American TV is now full of people making “shithole” jokes;

5.   Fox News is pushing an ISIS connection to the Las Vegas shooting that took the lives of something like fifty people;

6.   The American government is now shut down because our elected officials cannot agree on anything at all or work together in any way, shape, or form. This has happened even though one political party controls the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives (shut down on the one year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, BTW);

7.   The new stated goal of the Environmental Protection Agency is to eliminate regulations designed to protect our environment in order to insure greater profits for our corporations. In its public pronouncements, the “profits of our corporations” is referred to as “the good of the American people;”

8.   There is growing evidence from analysis of traffic before the 2016 election on Facebook and Twitter that 50,000 or so Russian “bots” were driving the dialog on those media for the benefit of Donald Trump. Trump, for his part, only repeats “no collusion” over and over again, as if that makes it all okay. If it was happening, it’s disgusting and dangerous whether he was in on it or not. And the worst part is that no one before the election or since seems to particularly care; and

9.   The State Department has been standing almost empty all year, and is continuing to lose many of its most experienced negotiators, country experts, and sanctions experts. Better to say that career diplomats in every category are getting tired of their assignments working with interns in the mailroom and are moving on to new jobs. They have marketable skill sets, so why not? With essentially no State Department, we have no way of influencing events in the world, except perhaps with new nukes and a stronger military, which is evidently the plan.

Serenity now! Let it all bounce off of you, like so many Pensie Pinkies! We must learn to live in our new, phantasmagorical H.P. Lovecraft universe!  We must become like millions of Dali Lamas!  Aware, but not concerned, that’s the idea! It’s worth the effort, dear readers, because worrying yourself to death is no laughing matter. I’ll be taking my doctor’s advice, and I’d advise you to take it, too.