Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

At this point, Mitch McConnell has become the Senate’s version of Schrödinger’s Cat. Unless you happen to live in Kentucky or have access to his medical records, who knows? Is he healthy? Is he sick? Is he working? Is he retired in everything but name? Is he even capable of performing the job? Until someone opens the box, he’s apparently all of the above.

What drives me crazy isn’t his age. It isn’t even his health. Everyone gets old, and everyone deserves privacy when it comes to medical issues.

What drives me crazy is accountability.

Imagine disappearing from your job for six or seven weeks without explanation. No meetings. No work. No measurable output. No showing up. No public updates beyond the occasional carefully staged “proof of life” photograph. Then imagine your employer saying, “No problem. Here’s your paycheck.”

How many Americans could pull that off?

The answer is essentially none.

Most people miss a week of work unexpectedly, and HR starts calling. Miss two weeks, and your job may no longer exist. Vanish for nearly two months while collecting roughly $174,000 a year plus some of the best healthcare available in the country, and most Americans would be laughed out of the unemployment office if they expected to keep getting paid.

Yet somehow that’s acceptable for a United States senator.

Meanwhile, the taxpayers continue paying the salary. The office continues operating. Kentucky continues having a senator who, by all appearances, hasn’t been participating in the legislative process. No votes. No floor speeches. No committee work. Just… silence.

The irony becomes even richer when you remember who we’re talking about.

This is the same Mitch McConnell who, in 2016, refused to even allow a hearing for Merrick Garland after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The justification? It was an election year, and “the people should decide.”

Then, in 2020, after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks before Election Day—while millions of Americans were already casting ballots—McConnell rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation through the Senate at record speed.

Apparently “let the people decide” came with an expiration date.

Whether you agreed with those decisions or not, they demonstrated one thing beyond question: when Mitch McConnell wanted the Senate to move quickly, the Senate moved quickly.

Now, however, we’re told not to ask questions about a senator who has effectively disappeared for nearly two months while remaining on the public payroll.

This isn’t really about Mitch McConnell as a person. If any senator—Republican, Democrat, or Independent—vanished from public view for weeks while continuing to collect taxpayer-funded pay and benefits, the public would have every right to ask a simple question:

Who’s doing the job?

Public office isn’t a lifetime membership at an exclusive country club. It’s employment funded by taxpayers. Every member of Congress works for the American people. If any employee stops performing their job for an extended period, there should be transparency about whether they are capable of continuing to serve.

Instead, we get vague statements, carefully selected photographs, and an expectation that everyone should simply stop asking.

It’s a bizarre inversion of accountability.

The people paying the salary are apparently the only people not entitled to know whether the employee is actually showing up for work.

Welcome to modern American politics, where ordinary workers are expected to justify every sick day, but elected officials can seemingly vanish into a quantum state of employment—simultaneously serving and not serving—while the paychecks continue arriving right on schedule.

It’s an upside-down world indeed.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

One of the strangest developments in modern American politics is watching people who proudly proclaim themselves to be followers of Christ dismiss Christ’s own words as though they were the ramblings of some naïve college freshman with an overpriced sociology degree.

Imagine introducing some of the teachings of Jesus today without mentioning who said them.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

The response might be, “That’s loser talk. Winners don’t inherit anything—they take it.”

“Love your enemies.”

“What kind of weak, woke nonsense is that?”

“Turn the other cheek.”

“Absolutely not. Hit them harder.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers.”

“Sounds soft.”

“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

“So we’re just supposed to let people do whatever they want? Typical woke garbage.”

“Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.”

“That’s socialism.”

“Sell what you have and give to the poor.”

“Sounds like wealth redistribution.”

And then comes perhaps the most uncomfortable verse of all:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Today that statement would probably be met with a thousand YouTube videos explaining why Jesus didn’t really mean what He plainly said. There would be podcasts, influencers, and television preachers twisting themselves into theological pretzels to explain that immense wealth is actually proof of God’s favor, despite Christ repeatedly warning about the spiritual dangers that accompany riches.

The irony is almost too thick to ignore.

If someone walked into many churches today quoting the Sermon on the Mount without identifying the speaker, there’s a fair chance they’d be accused of spreading liberal propaganda before anyone realized they were quoting the New Testament.

Somewhere along the way, parts of American Christianity seem to have undergone a remarkable transformation. Instead of asking, “What did Jesus teach?” the question has become, “Can we reinterpret what Jesus taught so it aligns with our politics?”

The Gospel has become less about challenging ourselves and more about confirming our existing beliefs.

Jesus spent His ministry among fishermen, tax collectors, lepers, widows, prostitutes, foreigners, and the poor. He consistently warned against pride, greed, and hypocrisy. He criticized religious leaders more often than sinners. He overturned the tables of those exploiting faith for profit. He preached forgiveness over vengeance, humility over arrogance, mercy over condemnation.

If someone described that résumé today without attaching Jesus’ name to it, many of the loudest voices claiming to defend Christianity might dismiss Him as another “woke loser” who didn’t understand how the real world works.

That’s the uncomfortable question.

Have some Christians become followers of Christ—or followers of a political ideology that simply borrows Christian vocabulary?

Christianity has always been demanding. Jesus never promised that following Him would be easy. In fact, He promised exactly the opposite. He challenged the powerful, comforted the powerless, and repeatedly instructed His followers to care for the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned.

Those teachings weren’t popular in first-century Judea.

They aren’t particularly popular in twenty-first-century America either.

Perhaps that’s because the Gospel was never intended to make us comfortable. It was intended to make us better.

The real measure of faith isn’t how loudly someone says they’re Christian. It’s how willing they are to wrestle with the difficult teachings of Christ—even when those teachings challenge their politics, their prejudices, or their personal ambitions.

If the words written in red are dismissed as weak, “woke,” or the language of losers, then perhaps the problem isn’t with the words.

Perhaps we’ve simply become more devoted to our politics than to the One who spoke them.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Nothing Teaches Geography Like Another War

One unexpected benefit of America’s seemingly endless ability to stumble into new international conflicts is that it finally gets people to dust off something they haven’t looked at since eighth-grade social studies: a world map.

Who knew the greatest investment in geographic literacy would be military action?

Every time a new country dominates the headlines, millions of Americans collectively ask the same question: “Wait…where is that?” Suddenly Google Maps becomes the most patriotic app on their phone. People who couldn’t find Ukraine, Iran, Yemen, or Taiwan on a globe a week ago are now passionately debating military strategy over coffee.

It’s educational.

Before the crisis, half the country couldn’t tell you whether a nation was in Europe, Asia, Africa, or if it was just another county in Texas. But once American bombs, sanctions, aircraft carriers, or troops enter the conversation, everyone becomes an armchair geopolitical expert. “Well, if you look at the Strait of Hormuz…” says the guy who thought Hormuz was a brand of hummus last Tuesday.

That’s progress.

President Trump seems determined to provide a continuing education course in world geography. Every new confrontation is another chapter in “Countries You Didn’t Know Existed Until They Started Trending.”

Maybe next we’ll get flash cards.

“Class, today we’re learning where the Caucasus are.”

“No, not those caucuses. Different spelling.”

Of course, geography is only the beginning. Soon people discover that countries have histories stretching back thousands of years, complicated ethnic divisions, religious tensions, colonial legacies, border disputes, and alliances that don’t fit neatly into a thirty-second cable news segment. Imagine that. The world isn’t just a collection of blank spaces waiting for America to arrive and explain democracy.

Who could have guessed?

It’s amazing how often Americans ask, “Why do they hate us?” while never asking, “What happened there over the last hundred years?” Context is apparently optional until it starts affecting gas prices.

And that’s usually when the map comes back out.

The irony is that learning geography is genuinely valuable. Understanding where nations are, who their neighbors are, what resources they possess, what trade routes they control, and why regional conflicts matter creates informed citizens. That’s something schools have tried to accomplish for generations.

Apparently, they were using the wrong incentive.

Forget textbooks. Forget globes. Forget National Geographic. Just announce another international crisis, and suddenly millions of people can point to places they couldn’t pronounce the day before.

It’s an expensive educational program, admittedly. The tuition is measured in billions of taxpayer dollars, countless lives disrupted or lost, veterans carrying lifelong scars, refugees fleeing their homes, and decades of geopolitical consequences. But look on the bright side—someone finally learned the difference between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s got to count for something…right?

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Forget the bald eagle. Retire Lady Liberty. Put Uncle Sam out to pasture.

The new symbol of American greatness is the adult having a full-scale emotional collapse because someone told them “no.”

For decades, America exported jazz, rock and roll, blue jeans, Hollywood, the moon landing, the internet, and an admittedly unhealthy number of fast-food chains. Now we’ve discovered our newest cultural export: the professionally offended, permanently aggrieved, chronically inconvenienced individual who believes every minor disappointment is a violation of their constitutional rights.

The coffee order was wrong? Tyranny.

The flight was delayed because of weather? Oppression.

Someone disagreed with them online? An attack on freedom itself.

A store ran out of their favorite flavor? Clearly civilization is collapsing.

The remarkable part isn’t that people complain. Humans have always complained. What’s new is the Olympic-level performance art that accompanies it. Every inconvenience is presented as though it belongs in a history textbook alongside actual oppression.

Previous generations fought wars, survived depressions, endured segregation, dictatorships, famine, and genuine political persecution.

Today’s modern American hero waited seven minutes for curbside pickup.

Somehow, these experiences are spoken about with roughly the same level of emotional intensity.

The world watches this spectacle with the fascination usually reserved for wildlife documentaries.

“And here,” the narrator says in hushed tones, “we see the American in its natural habitat. Notice how it interprets the slightest inconvenience as a deeply personal attack. Observe the dramatic gestures. Listen for the mating call: ‘This is unacceptable!’”

It’s magnificent.

Somewhere in another country, someone is wondering whether electricity will stay on long enough to refrigerate medicine.

Meanwhile, an American has produced a seventeen-minute video explaining how the restaurant put pickles on a sandwich after they specifically requested no pickles.

Clearly, history will remember both struggles equally.

The irony is almost poetic. Americans proudly proclaim themselves the toughest people on Earth while simultaneously demanding immediate emotional reparations because the Wi-Fi took thirty seconds to reconnect.

We’re rugged individualists—as long as customer service answers before the second ring.

We’re fearless pioneers—as long as the air conditioning stays below seventy-two degrees.

We’re defenders of liberty—unless someone parks in our favorite parking spot.

What makes this performance especially entertaining is the conviction that receiving exactly what everyone else receives somehow constitutes discrimination.

“I didn’t get special treatment.”

“How dare they treat me like everyone else!”

Somewhere along the line, equality stopped meaning equal opportunity and started meaning, “I should always get my preferred outcome.”

If reality fails to cooperate, reality is obviously biased.

The rest of the world has noticed.

For generations, America projected an image of confidence, resilience, innovation, and optimism—even when it fell short of those ideals.

Now, too often, the loudest voices project something entirely different: a nation convinced that inconvenience is persecution, disagreement is censorship, compromise is surrender, and patience is for lesser civilizations.

It’s a fascinating rebranding.

Instead of “the land of opportunity,” we’ve become “the land where every inconvenience deserves a formal complaint.”

Instead of rugged individualism, we’ve perfected fragile exceptionalism.

Instead of asking, “How do we solve this problem?” we ask, “Whose fault is it that I’m mildly uncomfortable?”

Perhaps that’s the greatest irony of all.

A country built by people who crossed oceans, crossed mountains, endured hardship, and took enormous risks is increasingly represented by people who believe waiting in line is a human rights violation.

If this truly is the image America wishes to project, then congratulations.

The bald eagle can finally retire.

Our new national mascot has arrived.

It’s wearing a shirt that says “Don’t Tread on Me,” demanding to speak to the manager because someone else got served first, and insisting—with absolute sincerity—that this is the greatest injustice in modern history.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

At what point do the American people—especially the most devoted MAGA supporters—stop and ask a simple question: What are our elected representatives actually accomplishing with our tax dollars?

Congress has an enormous list of responsibilities. The national debt continues to climb. Housing affordability is a crisis. Healthcare costs remain out of control. Infrastructure needs constant investment. Artificial intelligence is transforming the workforce. Water shortages threaten the Southwest. Those are the kinds of problems Congress was elected to solve.

Instead, far too much of Washington’s energy seems devoted to political theater.

We have members of Congress talking about bringing Special Counsel Jack Smith up on charges for allegedly misleading Congress during testimony. Whether one believes he was right or wrong, much of the controversy centers on whether his answers were sufficiently complete or whether he should have volunteered information beyond the questions he was asked. If Congress wants complete answers, then it should ask complete questions. If someone lies under oath, that is a serious matter and should be addressed through the legal system. But if the objective is simply to score political points, then taxpayers are funding another spectacle instead of another solution.

Then there is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has spent years answering questions about the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic’s earliest days occurred in 2019 and 2020. Mistakes were made by governments, scientists, politicians, and public health officials across the world as everyone tried to understand a rapidly evolving virus. There is value in conducting oversight and learning lessons for future pandemics. There is far less value in repeatedly calling the same witnesses before Congress if the goal is simply to replay old political battles rather than uncover new facts.

And somehow, years later, we are still hearing attempts to relitigate the 2020 presidential election. Courts across the country considered dozens of election-related lawsuits after that election, with many claims being rejected or dismissed. Congress certified the election, states certified their results, and the country moved on. Yet some politicians continue returning to the same arguments, as though replaying the past is somehow a substitute for governing in the present.

Every hour spent revisiting settled political grievances is an hour not spent addressing inflation, wages, healthcare, education, veterans’ services, infrastructure, immigration reform, or preparing the country for future economic and technological challenges.

Oversight is one of Congress’s constitutional responsibilities. Legitimate investigations are necessary in any healthy democracy. But oversight should be conducted to uncover facts, improve government, and hold officials accountable—not simply to generate headlines, satisfy partisan audiences, or keep old controversies alive indefinitely.

The question voters should ask is not whether they agree with every witness or every investigation. The question is whether these hearings are producing better government.

Are they making Americans healthier?

Safer?

More prosperous?

Or are they simply producing another viral video clip for social media?

Public office is supposed to be about solving tomorrow’s problems, not endlessly replaying yesterday’s political fights. Americans are paying their representatives to govern. At some point, regardless of party, voters should expect Congress to spend more time writing solutions than rehearsing grievances.

That is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue.

It is a governance issue.