They cry peace, peace, but there is no...what, what?

I've tried to avoid the toxic fever-swamp that is the GOP convention like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am. But it's really hard to keep out the sickly stench of the hate, paranoia, rage, and fear that seem to rise from off that seething heap of "conservative" pismires like stink off a fresh pile of park dogshit.

I have no sympathy for that niddering throng of past-their-sell-by-date-Eurocentric/Christopathic-morons. Largely because of their weapons-grade stupid rallying whimper:

Make America Great Again!

I hear that and I can't help thinking; seriously, people? Because we're living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape? WTF?

But then I pause for a moment and think about the sort of input we're exposed to in the present Information Age. Ed over at Gin and Tacos had a sort of paranoid-fear moment the other day:

"With the unbroken string of horrible, crazy shit that has cast a pall over the world in the last few months, and without the events in Dallas, in St. Paul, and (the first) Baton Rouge being fully digested and comprehended, there was no part of me able to even take in another story along the same lines. Throw in the major European/Asian terrorist attack of the week and I didn't just ignore the news on Sunday. I actively avoided it."

Yep. Especially if you're a news junkie. CNN and MSNBC and (of course) Fox "News" is full of this shit. If you take their "reportage" at face value you'd begin to believe that we really ARE living in the End of Days. Wars, rumors of wars, fire, murder, headchopping Muslims, cats and dogs living together...

But.

Stop. Think for a moment.

When was the last time your entire town or city was burned by an invading horde of horse nomads?

When was the last time your neighborhood was shadowed by a towering pyramid of the freshly-harvested skulls of your family, friends, and neighbors?

When you consider the sort of fucking ginormous catastrophes that litter human history – famines, plagues, folk-migrations, full-on civilization collapse – we really are living in pretty tranquil times.

That doesn't sell advertising minutes on CNN, though, so you'd never know it. But, really.

It kinda amazes me when I stop and think of CNN covering the Black Death, or the Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe. THAT would have been epic.

That frame for the story helps me keep my perspective.

That, and avoiding fucking CNN like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am.