End Times

“Why does NASA keep telling us stories about asteroids slamming into earth any year now?”

I was preparing that line as a witty comeback on Social Media just like my Mom and I joke with each other about space stuff all the time since the day we saw that UFO on the way home from our Tuesday evening at the municipal library, which my back seat siblings insisted was a mini-outbreak of mass hysteria, but Mom and I know, because it was My Turn to sit at “front seat door,” which means it was after we switched to a defined rotation as a truer alternative solution that we could agree upon related to the question of how far in advance of a planned car ride you could “call it,”  but then we argued over whether the rotation had to include cousins or neighbor kids, or did you keep different rotations for each of the combinations of cousins and friends, and what if one of you was at baseball and another was at dance, and What if your dad was driving and then Mom got the front seat door and your Dad made “all you kids sit in the back.”

I firmly believe what we saw that Tuesday was a meteor, an object that burns up in the atmosphere without causing any damage. Flames out. Grabs attention, then disappears. A chimera.

But maybe we are close to the end times, as my schoolmate calmly announced to her fellow alumni last October, as Halloween approached on a moist Saturday night that threatened rain that never dampened our dinner in line at the back yard taco truck, 45 years to the day (plus a couple of months) after we all became fellow alumni.

She was calm about the impending doom, and I remembered her from grammar school as a good girl, although physically less coordinated and academically a little slower, among the girls most likely to join the convent, but 40+ years as first an “airman” and then as a nurse had given her a self confidence that couldn’t be broken even by the enduring relationship loneliness she was unwilling to compromise her beliefs to defeat.

After all, we have a President who today – only today! – referred to himself as “the Chosen One” and referenced a tweet that almost called him “King of the Jews” on the same day he said Jews who vote Democrat are disloyal, all three comments unknowingly Apocalyptic and Anti-Christian/Semitic.  (Let’s use this multifarious blasphemy to call out the Evangelicals.)

And yet we as a country do not have potable water in the largest city of the most densely populated state in the union, and to top it off the government response (providing bottled water) is being decried as morally and woefully deliberately inadequate because the affected neighborhoods are poorer and darker, so much so that the Democratic Governor has to go on Cable News to defend his administration’s response.

But how about that Electoral College?

A Federal court ruled today that electors don’t have to vote according to state laws governing how electors vote, which in most states is all-or-nothing-goes-to-whoever-wins-a plurality of the votes. Part of the court’s reasoning is that when electors assemble as electors, they are acting in a federal capacity and are therefore not subject to state laws.

I guess it’s getting too expensive to buy the popular vote, even with the Constitution firmly on your side, so why not try to dramatically reduce the cost to the buyers and the revenue-per-seller to the sellers to make monetizing a Presidential election a WIN-WIN?

45 never works very long with any trusted advisors outside of his family and Hannity (for now). That means he got elected President of the USA mostly by his own methods! You might not like his methods, but they worked!

Now, tell me again why NASA keeps on telling us stories about asteroids slamming into earth any year now?