Community Bulletin Board

Next week, I turn 50 years old, completing a half-century of spinning around the sun. And I’ve noticed that many of the things that once shined bright in my youth have lost their luster. Many of the things that I valued and enjoyed—some of which I masochistically enjoyed—are no longer that important, or that much fun.

What I truly admired about these Romantic poets, however, was the fact that it didn’t seem like any of these dudes had to work real jobs. While Keats did train to be a surgeon, he died before he could practice medicine, and guys like Lord Byron didn’t have to put aside “Don Juan” to scrub dishes. 

When I was 12 years old, my cousin and I were racing our bikes on the street in front of my aunt and uncle’s house. We were gliding, neck and neck, toward the finish line at the end of the curb, when my cousin pulled ahead, and my front tire clipped my cousin’s back tire, launching me over the handlebars, face first, onto the cement. 

It took a glorified carnival barker and his billionaire buddies, led by one of the most soulless and reprehensible people on Planet Earth, putting our democracy in grave peril for me to realize that, other than voting and writing a few op-eds along the way, I have not given much to a democracy that has given me everything, mainly my freedoms.