April may be the "cruelest month," but January has to be the longest and maybe a close second in terms of nastiness. April is cruel partially due to the fickle nature of the weather, but January is mostly just bad weather of various types... with spring seeming so far off and ephemeral that it is dangerous to think about better weather (fearing we might jinx it all).
Politics is certainly full of cruelty, much of it without any particular point. McCarthy pretends to have some power as Speaker of the House by tossing some political opponents off committees, prompting anger and hurt or the joy of vengeance, depending on your POV. But not much will be happening in any House committees due to the general dysfunction of the Republican majority plus the dysfunction of the nation more widely.
Black men are routinely murdered by police officers, but also by their neighbors. And there are lots of innocent bystanders taking bullets, as well. Asian-Americans are slaughtered by angry older Asian men, robbing those massacres of even a sense that one racial group is targeting another. That means we can't make any sense of the deaths... though we all know, deep down, that it's about the nearly 400 million guns in this country of 335 million.
Thoughts and prayers, of course.
Teachers and students have always been attacked by people with axes to grind, but the level of hate and ignorance has risen to alarming levels. There is outrage on all sides surrounding the AP course on African-American history that was rejected by Florida, mostly to play to the basest members of the Republican Party. College Board caved, say many progressives, and maybe it did.
But have we forgotten that the College Board is not in the business of education? It's in the business of selling tests. Americans aren't really sure what the heck the role of ACT and College Board might be... but assume that the education establishment supports those college-prep institutions. They aren't evil. They just aren't directly educating anyone.
College Board wants its products to sell. College Board has to listen to the customers. It's just capitalism.
American children continue to go hungry at alarming rates. Nearly 500 people a day die from Covid, but the pandemic is over. Undocumented migrants are bussed to big cities and just dropped there. As a nation, we just shrug. Cruelty is as American as apple pie.
TikTok needs to be banned because, well, China. Russian continues to murder with impunity. Does anyone remember Syria? The Taliban suppress half the Afghanistan population.
Maybe we should just get over it: the world is a cruel place, and always has been.
And January seems to be the longest month, as well as the coldest and most brutal.
It's over, thank goodness.
Baseball spring training is just a few weeks away, which reminds me of the cruelty of being a Rockies fan. But that's another story for another day.
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