Up and down

I have high blood pressure, damn it.  I don't know how much I can tolerate of the absurdly hot and cold news that I get from Research Country, day by day, hour by hour.  I mean, none of us can!  Everyone posting on Facebook, sending tweets, or – as in the case of one or two of my associates – chiming in as experts on news programs is completely worn out and stunned and angry.  I mean, ANGRY.  It's not good for our health.  But we have trouble staying calm when the figures we see on TV (or, in my case, on my laptop) seem to be sadistically and incomprehensibly playing with the emotions of everyone who cares about this situation.  I have the distinct feeling that all of this will get worse before it gets better.

I want to chant and shout and march.  But, as Ajnabieh has remarked, my American body is perhaps not really appropriate to this context, and possibly even inimical to the things I believe in.  And besides, I'm sitting here in a Starbucks in Evacuation City, so I can keep up wifi access and overpay for lunch.  I'd just look like an unmedicated, over-caffeinated crazy here.

I maintain the hope and cautiously optimistic conviction that this will end well in the long term, but this short term is scaring the pants off of all of us.  I really have no idea how things will look in another twelve hours from now.  All of which, if I must look for a silver lining, at least seems to vindicate my decision to evacuate.  (I heard on the news five minutes ago that the road to the airport from which I flew a week ago has now been blocked altogether.  Wheee!)  What a story it will all make, though.