CT Blue

Lately I’ve been feeling highly anxious, but until today I wasn’t sure why.

I considered a number of possibilities, among them:

• The fact that the president of the United States is a narcissistic authoritarian bent on making himself a dictator even as he declines into senescence.
• The fact that the same president has stocked the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with ideologues who will give a stamp of approval to anything he and Republicans do while they chomp at the bit to overturn existing progressive legislation, precedent that favors the rights of women and minorities, and anything that manages to pass in the unlikely event the Democrats take the presidency and the Senate in 2020.
• The fact that the Democrats appear likely to nominate Joe Biden in order to guarantee that the courts won’t need to bother to overturn progressive legislation after 2020 because there won’t be any.
• The fact that our constitutional system appears to have arrived at the point where its internal contradictions (e.g., a Senate where Wyoming has the same representation as California, an Electoral “College” less able to pick a reasonable president than the people at large, etc.) will result in the destruction of our formerly republican form of government.
• The fact that our press, when not in the business of actively propagandizing for the forces of plutocracy, is busily normalizing those forces instead of calling them out for what they are.

All or any of these things seemed plausible, and yet… I couldn’t help thinking that there was something else… that this feeling; this sense of impending doom had some other source. How can I describe it? I felt like I was bracing for some kind of disaster.

Thank the non-existent Lord for the New London Day, which cleared it all up today with this front page headline:

Retailers, shoppers brace for plastic bag tax ahead of ban! (Exclamation point added)

This cleared it all up! What more fearful impending doom than the prospect of paying ten cents a bag should I forget to bring my reusable bags into Stop & Shop? Why for ten cents you can buy two Hershey bars, assuming, of course, you are charged what they cost 50 years ago. I now realize that I’ve been bracing myself for this day of disaster ever since the Connecticut legislature put environmental considerations above the convenience of our corporate overlords. Now that I know the source of my anxiety, I will just have to figure out a way of dealing with it.

If you, too, have been feeling anxious about the state of our world, now you know why. My advice: follow the philosophy of the dear departed Alfred E. Newman and don’t worry. It will be alright. Sure, you’re going to miss those plastic bags, but in a few years some federal court will probably strike down state laws banning them as violations of the commerce clause, and you can get them right back!