REFLECTIONS/Jonathan Gramling
Ball of Confusion
The late Ada Deer used to always ask me when we would get together for lunch at Quivey’s Grove, “Where do you get all of your ideas for your column and stories?’ And I would say, ‘From interacting with the people and the world around me.”
And that is so true. No person is an island and so we depend on other people to gain our intellectual and physical sustenance. I hate to think what I would be like if I didn’t have that interaction. That is why I rarely take credit for the things that I do because I know that the fingerprints of many other people are on the work as well.
I bring this up because I emailed my friend Kwame Salter last week to see how he was doing because I hadn’t heard from him in a while. He said that he was doing okay, just dealing with the ball of confusion that is the world today. And I responded back that the Temptations has summed it up well in their 1970s release “Ball of Confusion” that rattled off musically the many issues facing the world at that time including civil rights and the war in Vietnam, just to name a couple.
And so I must thank Kwame for the inspiration for this column. I owe you one Kwame.
It’s hard focusing on getting a newspaper published every two weeks because there are so many wacky things happening in the world that almost demand my attention. I am sometimes memorized by it all even though I sometimes just want to say ‘The world sucks,” which it doesn’t.
In our own backyard, there are the Republicans led by Assembly Speaker Robyn Vos trying to enact legislation in record time that isn’t in the long-term interests of the state just because he wants to maintain Republican Party hegemony over the Wisconsin legislature, no matter what a majority of Wisconsinites want. I mean talking about impeaching a state supreme court justice before she has done anything or taken a vote? Our entire state government could be consumed with taking people out and eliminating leadership while the ship of state veers off course because it is leadership. Vos has the toy and doesn’t want to give it up. Talk about narcissism.
And then there is Donald Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party with almost 100 criminal charges against him in state and federal courts. I and every other sane person readily admits when they are at fault. And none of us is God where we make no mistakes. But the most common refrain that I have heard from Trump in the last six years is, ‘I did nothing wrong. It’s a witch hunt. I am being persecuted. They stole the 2020 election from me. They are trying to prevent me from getting elected in 2024.” What a whiner. Again, this is a spoiled, narcissistic child who screams and hollers until he not only has what is his, but also what is yours and mine as well.
And then there is the long-term fiasco in the Middle East. It’s always the innocent who are the victims of war. First the Hamas slaughter innocent young people at a music festival and in other places, just shooting at random with the express purpose of murdering innocent people and now everyday Palestinian citizens are dying in the bombardments Israel is doing in retaliation. The Hamas are probably hiding in their tunnels while the Palestinian people suffer the brunt of the bombardment. I personally don’t view Hamas as the leaders of the Palestinian people anymore than I view Donald Trump as the leader of the American people. They are the perfect example of anti-leaders, self-absorbed nihilists.
Democracies have ended in Africa and Latin America through military takeovers to presumably save the citizens of the countries from themselves. There is a certain level of arrogance in taking over a country and desolving the government because you know best.
Tensions seem to be growing in the Far East as China, it appears, continues to — or attempt to — assert its hegemony over lands that it never occupied. Taiwan, which had never been a part of the Chinese Mainland until the Chinese Nationalists retreated there after World War II. I guess since it was Chinese people who retreated there, it meant that China owned the land under their feet. And the northern Philippine Islands have suddenly become Chinese property, probably because it is dawning on people that valuable minerals and oil lie beneath the waves.
It seems that civilization is under attack everywhere, that the rule of might and power is the only thing that too many people recognize and the belief in a higher authority, whether that is God or the rule of laws is considered a weakness.
This is not a situation that can sustain humanity. It is a ball of confusion through which human beings will flare out and disappear from the face of the Earth. In today’s parlance, it is not sustainable.