Sorting through and ranking our issues is not easy

I have to admit to having problems in the past few years in sorting out the true emergency issues to fret about from the storm of outrageous issues that make me crazy but that deserve to sit on a lower level of my mental pyramid of problems.

Trump is a moron, and almost everyone can agree on that. He stole/mishandled documents and that was both stupid and a clear crime. But the more we all focus on something that is stupid, the less bandwidth we have remaining to focus on Trump's Jan. 6 plot and the continuing efforts to replace a representative democracy with an autocracy.

That second one is the truly apocalyptic emergency that I can't lose sight of.

The threat of nuclear weapons being used against Ukraine (or other European countries) should be my number one worry right now -- not that I can do much about it. It's not that there is no coverage of this continuing threat but there is a tendency among the normal to rationalize behaviors of the abnormal.

Putin, like Trump, is among the abnormal, but the rational majority can't conceive of how far those two autocrats are willing to go, so I read lots of "think pieces" predicting that Putin won't use those tactical nukes because the long-term negatives outweigh the immediate positives for him.

OK, but that is an analysis based on all sides behaving rationally. What if it turns out that Putin, like Trump, is a bit crazy? Does logic still apply?

Today we read that Senate candidate Herschel Walker paid for a woman's abortion, making him the latest hypocritical politician caught doing exactly what he or she rails against. Rational analysts predict that THIS will be last straw, and Walker's bizarre candidacy will be punished with defeat.

But the Angry White People Party is likely to stick with this obviously brain-damaged Black man, refusing to admit that they made a mistake. The idea that our elected leaders should be competent and reasonable is so last century, I guess.

Many of our neighbors are fine with voting for degenerates and the obviously unprepared as long as they do not have the hated "D" behind their name on the ballot.

At a small gathering yesterday, a friend stated that some people have left our little Methodist church because they feared being surrounded by Democrats... and we all know that even being in proximity to the evil ones can rub off on us.

I wanted to scoff at that notion, but in a world where there are so many indignities and so much tribalism and so little attention to factual reporting, can I really be surprised?