Twelve years
ago this week I started Battling the Current. I’ve spent the past few weeks
going through old posts as I am trying to compile a “Best of” compilation that
I could publish on Kindle. At least that way I could lie to myself and say that
I have written a book. This has led me to spend a lot of time thinking about
what made me start writing about my life on the Internet for a group of
strangers.
When I
started this project, I was basically lost in my own life. I lived in Kansas
City, had few friends and spent most of my time either at concerts or sitting
at a bar drinking alone until closing time on any day that happened to end in a
Y. I wasn’t happy with my job; I wasn’t happy with my life and I wasn’t happy
with who I was. So, I started to write about my experiences as this guy in his
early thirties who was trying to figure out who he was and what he was doing
wrong with his life.
I stopped writing
in 2011 mainly because that journey had ended. I had overcome my shyness and
awkwardness and made great friends. I found myself in a job that I loved and
had, after a miraculous set of occurrences that still defy all rational
explanation, married the woman of my dreams. The woman who, when I started
writing this blog, I wished would read it just to know that she had never left
my mind.
But that
wasn’t the only reason I started writing.
I had just
seen an election end in a way that defied belief. Working in Kansas left me
surrounded by people professing thoughts and ideas that I just could not
fathom. I looked at the world around me and it just didn’t make sense. I know
that I am not as smart as I think I am but I knew that our world could be so
much better if we just tried for once so that was the other aspect of the blog:
writing about my befuddlement at the world around me. Sometimes it was finding
humor in the inane and sometimes it was my “dime store philosophy” on what matters
in life.
That need to
write faded in the last five years as well. Not that the craziness still didn’t
exist but life made more sense. I am now in my forties and married with a
mortgage and I am no longer on a first name basis with a dozen bartenders. My
life is in no way easy but my trials and tribulations are common and personal.
It just wasn’t what I needed to write about. My life and the world around me
seemed normal.
And then
last night happened.
I sat and
watched the election returns and found myself going from happy and confident to
very concerned to incredibly depressed in the span of two hours. Someone who I
believe has no qualifications to be president has become it. Someone who appalls
me by his personal behavior and statements is now in control. And if you asked
me what I did to stop it all I can say is that I cast my solitary vote against
him. I didn’t even write about it.
Now I fully
respect every person’s right to vote for whomever they wish. I have many
friends, including some of the best people I know, who voted for Trump. But all
I felt from this entire campaign is a platform of fear. Fear of change, fear of
the unknown, fear of progress and a desire to go back in time to the way things
used to be. Make America Great Again by going back to what it was. Except that
as anyone who studies history knows what this nation was is not something we
can look back upon with perfect fondness.
I heard many
times from Trump supporters that “I want my country back.” The problem is that
this country is not singular, it’s plural. It is our country. It has always
been our country. We are all in this together. Any time you single out people
as “the other” who don’t belong you ruin all the work we have done in two
centuries to overcome our faults and to make the American Experiment
worthwhile.
As much as
Trump promises a return to the old days and of blue collar jobs becoming
plentiful it ignores the fact that those jobs don’t exist anymore. The fact
that they are done by American robots instead of Chinese robots or Mexican
robots does not change the unvarnished truth that humans need not apply. The
issue of income inequality, of the loss of the manufacturing base with nothing
to replace those jobs, is the greatest issue facing the economy today. With that
I agree with Trump. It’s just that his plan wouldn’t make it past a first-year
macroeconomics course.
So, what
does this all mean? I’ve sat around today and wondered what is next for me: my
job, my life and my future. And I find myself thinking of where I was twelve
years ago when I decided to start putting my thoughts into the ether in the
hope that somehow, someway, in doing so the world would make sense. That maybe,
I could help someone else on the same journey. Well, I think the time to do so
again has returned. Time to write about middle age and a world that has lost
the plot and maybe, just maybe, this time we can make things right for good.
