Keepin' It Real

Fact One: A cousin of mine, and his wife, just returned from a visit to Wisconsin. After gasoline prices rose to $5 per gallon in some places, my folks lucked out and paid no more than $2.91 per gal. Petroleum was over $150 per barrel a month ago, and now it's below $70 per barrel. Fact Two: The stock market, real estate values, and credit have tanked, but the Social Security seems on steroids by comparison. Fact Three: I had a colonoscopy today, and no polyps or other nasties were found. A friend of mine - and some thirteen years younger - had the same invasive fun a month ago. His doctor found a cancerous tumor. Fact Four: The Boston Red Sox pulled out another miracle win - down 7-1, they won 8-7 - the biggest postseason turnaround in baseball history - while Joe Torre (formerly of the regal NY Yanks, now of the equally elite LA Dodgers) dropped an embarrassing series to the blue-collar Phillies. Fact Five: U.S. voters seem more enthralled by social and political dirt than the issues that keep them working, well-fed, and healthy. Fact Six: The International Monetary Fund (IMF), formerly U.S.-controlled turf, is now leading the way through our current financial meltdown via Europeans. Fact Seven: Josh Brolin's portrayal of George W. Bush seems more humanly realistic than the poor man (W) seems as I watch him on TV. NOTE: I'll try to keep this post from being any more of a political rant than it is already, but I'm not promising. The impact on readers of these facts - despite one's political, social, or economic point of view - will likely be one of frustration. Or anger. Or the urge to denial. But this is where the best qualities of art and entertainment come in. Sports bare the human qualities of planning, cooperation, endurance - these qualities necessary to prevail in times of challenge. And sports allow us a relatively safe emotional outlet for the frustrations that accompany change in other arenas of life. Not coincidentally, what we see through sports at the moment, it the durability of blue-collar grit over the rule of show-me-the-money elitism.

Art serves the same human needs, but in a different way. Through its process of mimesis, art colors "real" life, exaggerates it, contextualizes it in a way that allows us to re-experience it, to see it anew, without the blankness of boredom and overexposure. As such, art is as neutral a thing as "real" life itself, but it affords us a view of its foibles and strengths - without preconceptions and biases.  So what does the future hold for us (and here I mean all seven billion atoms of Humanity)? The bare-naked truth of of it is: Whatever we choose. Change, too, is a neutral thing. But it's real. The angst-ridden human state of "How do I cope with change?" is a dream state of too-many options. This dream state is where the worst of political life leads - to constant yammering about the best approach to life, without a roadmap of how to get there. But politics should be a means to an end - that end being a secure, rewarding life for all - not the ideological oneupmanship we've persisted in obsessing over, this state serving only our personal and tribal egos.