Beast or Beauty 

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I haven't even been home three weeks from the annual City Weekly Greece excursion, and I'm ready to go back. I've felt that way before, longing to be on a perfectly blue sea beach instead of raking half-frozen leaves in my backyard.

This time, it's a little bit different, though. For the month I was away, I never watched TV. That removed me from the daily local drone of quarrels between the reds and the blues, the lefts and the rights, the self-righteous and the soiled, the conservatives and the liberals, the dumb and the dumber.

I also never read any newspapers. That put me in the category of dumb and dumber right there, and I freely admit it. In that information vacuum, it became more clear why we are where we are today as a divided country and people—it's a damned easy task to remain actively dumb while it's a very hard job to become even passively smart.

I'm now convinced, dumb as I've become, that all the folks running around being dumb or dumber find it an easier path than actually studying a topic or believing that the USA isn't the jacked-up mess that our politicians want us to believe it is.

In our dumb and dumber world, we allow ourselves to think the opposite of our true selves. We tend to now look in the mirror and not see gray hairs, missing hairs or hairs where they shouldn't be—but instead we see the handsome Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. He was so rock dumb, he didn't know it, which enabled him to believe his own myth. And yeah, he was handsome—to some—but that only hid his other defects, like arrogance and manipulation.

The trouble with us now—so many of us actually choosing to be dumb and dumber—is that we have accepted arrogance and manipulation as positive traits when they are not. We let truth die as we honor liars. We regard compassion as weakness as we dishonor the honorably tough. We make excuses for every bad behavior. We choose our red and blue teams, fully believing the other team is the dumber, not the dumb.

In today's economy of not really thinking about anything, we've blurred the lines of the playing field, which hardly matters when the rulebooks are meaningless as well. That's left our populace cheering for persons they'd normally despise or becoming full-blown advocates for causes they did not once support. We not only don't trust our institutions, we don't trust each other.

It used to be a neighborly rule that if my neighbor needed a wrench, I would provide it. If I needed gas for the lawn mower, he might provide that. In the wayback days or seasons—say, even five or 10 years ago—it was formerly common for a neighbor to deliver some cookies or accept a beer. Now, that only happens during zucchini harvest.

It's become hard to know who among my neighbors are the ones who would like to "Mike Pence" me. Therefore, I wave and try to make small talk, but I'm leery about stepping on their lawns.

A few years ago, I drove to an old friend's home and delivered him scads of tomatoes. Instead of it being seen as an opportunity to mix them with cucumbers, green peppers, red onion, feta cheese and Kalamata olives, he took it as a signal of solidarity with him and his beliefs. Before I got home, I started getting messages about all kinds of weird conspiracies and generic finger-pointing about who the bad guys are and what was going to happen to them.

But he was dumb and dumber long before me, and thus, he didn't understand that he was pulling the trigger on his old friend. Or maybe he was and didn't care.

He's not gotten my tomatoes since. The thing is, he doesn't fly a F--k Biden flag or wear a Let's Go, Brandon hat. It caught me off guard. I've never known him to act like a racist or anti-Semite. He's never been politically active or for-or-against any front-page social causes like Choice or Equality. He doesn't like the price of gas, and neither do I. We both have no clue what inflation, recession or deficit spending really are. We just think we do.

We used to have so much in common, but now our differences define us along the simplest of lines. One team believes character and ethics matter and that any person found guilty of insurrection against our government should go to jail. The other team believes that voting for Joe Biden is a death-penalty offense and that anything that someone else has, was gotten illegally. It isn't. We either do all we can to sustain democracy or succumb to the growing chorus believing that not only does democracy result in an inefficient and ineffective government but that an authoritarian form of government—in some circles even returning to monarchical or theocratic rule—is what we must become.

If I weren't so dumb and dumber these days, I'd ask my old friend that if authoritarianism is so hot, why did millions of people die resisting it in World War II? Or if monarchy rule is the endgame, then why does England have such crappy food? And why, since his team is so Islamophobic, can't he credit Islamic theocracies for their ruling endurance?

There will be no answers until the day comes when he looks in the mirror and doesn't see Gaston, but instead, the Beast. The Beast ultimately reformed and ascended to Beauty, just as the last rose petal fell. How many rose petals do we have left?

Send comments to john@cityweekly.net.