In the United Kingdom and in some other places, the silly season is the period lasting for a few summer months typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. It is known in many languages as the cucumber time. The term was coined in an 1861 Saturday Review article,[1] and was listed in the second edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894) and remains in use at the start of the 21st century. The fifteenth edition of Brewer’s expands on the second, defining the silly season as “the part of the year when Parliament and the Law Courts are not sitting (about August and September)”. – Wikipedia
In the early ‘90s I was living in newly-liberated Poland and working in a bank one day a week helping employees improve their English conversation skills.
The bank offices were being renovated and a glass door had been installed in the offices. This was kind of a new thing those days. To give themselves a greater feeling of privacy, some of the guys had put up some Playboy centerfolds on the glass.
Surprisingly to me, it didn’t seem to bother the ladies who worked there. I pointed out to the group that in America the ladies could sue the pants off the bank.
I don’t know how I expected them to react, but it did surprise me.
One employee just looked terribly sad and said, “You must have a wonderful country you can afford to worry about such things. We have real problems.”
Well, our country must still be pretty wonderful.
If I had to name the top things that worry me right now, they’d be:
One, the growing suspicion that in spite of the administration’s crowing about their signature accomplishment, Iran has not given up their program to acquire nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
Two, that Putin is bent on creating a resurgent Russian Empire, skillfully spreading subversion, disinformation, and encouraging terrorism and small wars around the world. Worse, he’s good at it.
The KGB or whatever they call it these days, is better at stirring up trouble than we are at figuring out what kind of trouble it’s stirring up.
Three, the Third World is moving in with the First World. Everybody by now must have seen those pictures of hordes of Middle Eastern and North African Muslims battering at the gates of Europe, while inside Europe their cousins remain largely unassimilated minorities whose effect on their host societies is overall pretty negative.
In our country we have a milder version of the problem. We have large and increasing numbers of illegal residents, although of a culture closer to ours and a higher degree of assimilation.
So how we can maintain these democracies so painfully built over the last few centuries if we have such large numbers among us who have no comprehension of how democracies do things nor any particular desire to learn?
So call me a bigot, many have. But first, answer the question.
And lastly but perhaps most immediately, we have two rogue candidates running for the presidential nomination of their respective parties. And though I’m not particularly thrilled with the prospect of either of them becoming president I do like the way they’ve shaken up the ossified party system.
To a point that is.
What if come the election, the nominees are Cruz and Clinton as seems more and more likely?
Then we’re going to have substantial minorities in each party convinced the nomination was stolen from their candidate. And people convinced one candidate is in fact ineligible to run, only the Republican this time.
Has that ever happened before? It’s happened with one party, but to my knowledge not both at the same time.
So with all this happening around us, what are we concerned about? What are we arguing passionately about? What are friendships breaking up over?
Bathrooms!
Because one state passed a law requiring people to use public restrooms in accordance with the gender on their birth certificate, the nation is passionately arguing about the comfort of a segment of society no larger than three-tenths of one percent at most.
Why did they even pass that law? I presume those unfortunates could either pass as members of the opposite sex or not. If they could, I suppose they used their bathroom of choice.
If not, what do drag queens do? Did anybody even notice before this blew up in our faces?
We could have continued with the mild hypocrisy we indulge in for these situations but somebody had to make an issue of it and then somebody had to pass a law. And now we’re at each others throats over…?
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. We appear to be peeing.
We’re making Nero look sane.