About an hour ago, I saw something I've never seen before driving past my house. I live on a fairly well-traveled residential street and it's even more-traveled when certain nearby commercial streets are closed, as they may be today. Honking horns prompted me to look out a window and I saw what I guess you'd call a Troop Truck driving by — a truck with about a dozen soldier-types seated in back wearing camouflage-type outfits and helmets…and not looking all that comfy in them. (It's 84 degrees out.)
I dunno if the troop truck was honking or if folks in cars were but attention seemed to be the point of it. Those men could have been transported in a bus but that wouldn't have projected the same "ready for battle" image as looking like World War II infantry being shuttled to the front lines. Presumably, they were National Guardsmen being driven somewhere to protect something, possibly in the Hollywood area. Then again, maybe the idea was to just drive them around and scare troublemakers.
I don't know how I feel about what I saw but it sure didn't look like any America I've ever been born in.
People keep saying how divided the nation is and I think we all agree, at least, on that. We also would probably agree with a sentence like, "This is not how we want the United States to be." It's when we get to (a) how we want things to be and (b) who's responsible for them not being like that that we get into — shall we say? — Areas of Disagreement.
Short of that, we're all unhappy with what the pandemic has done to us and the economy and we're pretty unhappy with the racial unrest and the looting unless we got a new Samsung 65" Class 4K UHD LED LCD TV out of the deal. We're unhappy that our political party (whichever one it is) doesn't have a lock on the November election and that we don't know when the virus thing will end and what will and won't be there after it does. Oh — and in the next few weeks, we're likely to be pretty unhappy with what an active hurricane season will do to parts of this country that didn't need any more misery.
But we will get through it. And the silver lining of adversity is that it teaches you lessons in coping with adversity. For instance, the next time I have a disaster and I have absolutely no idea what to do, I know what to do: I'll have someone clear the street by firing rubber bullets and tear gas (and denying they used those things) and then I'll march down to some building I've barely been in and hold up some book I've never read and try to look real, real tough for any cameras that may be around.
And then I'll scurry home to change my underwear.