Five Things To Be Optimistic About Even As A Pseudo-Ethos of Greed, Hatred, Idiocy, And Incompetence Devours The Known Universe

Well, but, then again...

We here at A Quick Word From Joshua W. Jackson get a little sad sometimes. We get, oh, a little bit down, let’s say, when the federal government of the United States of America is openly revoking visas as acts of revenge for students having written op-eds that displease the Administration, when our tax dollars are paying to deport people to internationally infamous Salvadoran starvation chambers despite court orders and those very same tax dollars are being spitefully withheld from the socially significant areas to which they’ve been duly allocated by Congress—safety nets that keep families afloat or keep farms in business or deliver hard-earned benefits to veterans and senior citizens. We have a tough time steering the conversation elsewhere when the criminal President is doing commercials for his unelected accomplice’s failing car company on the White House lawn while his military and security advisors accidentally blast out confidential war plans to a journalist, or when our neighbors are literally telling the press how stoked they are about the President’s deliberately cruel mass deportation agenda, except, “Not all immigrants. I mean, my sister-in-law is one. I don’t want her going back to her country. She’s not legal right now,” and our heads explode into a thousand gnarly bits while we’re trying to wrap our brains around such a vast chunk of vapidity. Sometimes, the only thing we can do is stay up way too late watching Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and the next morning when we’re buying bananas and they ring up incorrectly at the cash register, we jump up onto the conveyer belt and scream at the checkout lady, “Either I’m dead right about this or I’m crazy!” and launch into a filibuster that reveals the incomprehensible depths of our impotent rage, prattling on about how “There’s no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties!” until at long last the guy who clears the shopping carts from the parking lot is called in to escort us off the premises, and we never even get our bananas.

At times like this, we try to remind ourselves that it is not necessary for this publication to provide its readers with answers or explanations for how things might possibly eventually (but in all likelihood absolutely will not) turn out just fine, nor with advice on how to square one’s love for one’s country’s noble ideas and heroic struggles with the overwhelming and immediate evidence of its brutality, racism, classism, and stupidity. We like to remind ourselves, in these darker moments, that our readers have likely spent an equal or greater tally of hours wallowing in such realities, and that they are either with us in our frustration, plotting to lead us out of it, or else talking to the local newspapers about how much they love this Administration’s policies except as those policies might apply to people they personally know. What a bunch of—

Where were we? Ah, yes. We here at A Quick Word consider it our mission to provide only the most uniquely personal and intimately subjective insight into cultural, societal, and political affairs. Failing that, our aim is to make at least one person half-smile for a second or four and perhaps think or even say aloud: “Heh.”

And so we’re courageously ignoring our almost but-just-not-quite-undeniable urge to publish a potentially useful call to action or a note of encouragement toward productivity or a historical contextualization or a meaningful analysis of the moment in favor of hitting you with a listicle.

Without further ado, here are five things that do not, like almost everything else, currently make us want to smack ourselves or somebody else in the forehead with a brick:

1. The … um…

2.

3. …

Actually, we’re having trouble thinking of anything right at this instant. We started to say, “The baseball season is here!” but that led into a meditation about baseball’s theoretical worthiness of being called the American pastime because of its inherently democratic nature, for the way that the advantaged team can never take away the disadvantaged team’s potential by manipulating a clock or hogging the ball, how the down are never out until they’ve had equal opportunities to score, and, well, you can see how the train of thought failed to improve our mood. But there must be other cheery topics untouched by this cloud of toxic waste, this ball of sludge hanging over our heads. “Gee,” we asked ourselves, “what about old movies?” and that was fine for a moment but there we went again, under the spell of Jimmy Stewart, climbing onto our desks and screaming, “Either I’m dead right about this or I’m crazy!” And now there’s no guy in the parking lot coming to get us down.

We’ll see you next month if the desks give way beneath our feet. Otherwise, we may never step off our jag. But we invite you to join us.