“It Was a Short Winter, Charlie Brown”

...and half the year just flew past it.

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I knew before the 2^nd of January was over that I wasn’t going to make a writing streak out of the first couple of weeks of the year. Now, halfway through the year, less than six months out from Christmas 2026….

I’d gone into 2026 with a vague sense of dread but those first seven days were rather encouraging, as far as the news went. Venezuela’s dictator and his wife were surgically removed from their own bed by Delta Force and flown to jail in NYC. As a follow-up, we were entertained by videos of drug-running boats from that country being blown out of the water and oil tankers redirected to our shores. Then the pervy and corrupt governor of Minnesota quit his bid for re-election because of the work of a young citizen journalist exposing billions of dollars of fraud perpetrated by the large Somali community there.

Soon afterward, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolved. Apparently they depended upon our tax dollars by more than the oft-stated 3% to spread their propaganda. Thanks to the intervention of some leftist billionaires, NPR and PBS are still a thing, though. Only so many people, mostly upper middle class/gatekeeper class types, still watch and listen to this dross, but the secular Narrative must continue to be preached, if only to keep the gatekeeper classes strong in the Faith.

Then, at long last, the FDA’s decades-old food pyramid was flipped over. Well before the COVID psy-op, the fact that the priestly class of Scientists and Experts™ were preaching grains and cereal were better for us than red meat convinced me the holy and state-blessed Science™ was bogus, so this was a long-awaited victory for us reality-based people. I could do a whole post on this. I just might.

Right on the seventh day, though, all of the above was swept under the media rug by an incident involving the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Minneapolis. A fat, homely lesbian with the ironic surname of Good made a point of blocking the street with her SUV, making it difficult for  federal law enforcement agents to arrest and deport a known felon. After being told repeatedly to exit her vehicle she turned her wheels to run over an officer, who got around the front end of her SUV and squeezed off multiple rounds to her head.

For the rest of January and all of February, the manufactured drama between the hired actors harassing the ICE agents doing their jobs dominated the news. I was especially taken by social dynamics I could never have imagined in my youth. As a young man in the 20^th century, I knew well that if a law enforcement officer told you to get out of the vehicle, you got out of the vehicle before he could grab you by the shirt, pull you out, and throw you to the ground. You did not talk back to a law enforcement officer, let alone shout in his face. Save for a precious few video-recorded incidents, the ICE agents were eerily forbearing of their over-the-top emotionally unhinged protestors.

A classically rodent-faced liberal male harassed some ICE agents, reached for his gun, and was summarily taken out. He’d had two full magazines in his pockets along with his fully loaded pistol, so it was apparent (at least to me) this character was planning on taking a lot of people out. Instead, his photo was artificially beautified by the press and the homicidal creep was made into a martyr.

President Donald Trump came to the rescue of this seemingly never-ending media focus on ICE and its paid harassers by doing the very thing myself and others knew he was installed to do—get together with the Israeli Defense Force to declare war on Iran. It went as well as I’d thought it would, with the world’s once mightiest armed forces backing down in shameful defeat. Gasoline prices soared well above four dollars a gallon and, as of this writing, is now just below that amount, with little hope of it going further down, now that the Iranians are charging tolls for all ships going through the Straits of Hormuz. And here I am wondering why our glorious armed forces didn’t use their sci-fi weapons on the Iranians, as they’d supposedly done with the Venezuelan armed forces in January. Apparently that sonic weapon making the Venezuelan soldiers sick was a one-time use thing. But where are the directed energy weapons used to start wildfires here on U.S. soil so they could blame “climate change”?

Speaking of climate change, it seemed winter only lasted a few weeks here in the San Luis Valley. We had only a few days of below-zero temperatures, and by the middle of February the cold weather was almost entirely behind us. It got so preternaturally warm the cottonwoods and Chinese elms began budding and leafing out a full two months or more in advance. By the end of March even the poplars were budding, and the timing absolutely wrecked the blossoming of the lilacs and poppies. Only one poppy out of two dozen in our yard blossomed, and that lasted only so many days until a windstorm shredded it. The rest of the poppies simply yellowed and died.

For as much as I hate the cold and dark of winter, our house is dark during the summer  because we have to draw the curtains against the hottest summer we’ve endured in the nearly ten years we’ve lived here in the Valley. It was in the mid-90s one week in a place where 78 is normally the high mark. I’m already wondering if we’ll be permitted a proper fall and winter this year. I’m not optimistic about our prospects.

I knew it was going to be a depressing year, but not so bad that I could barely bring myself to write about it. I started this piece several times since March. It’s bad enough I abandoned the idea of finishing my zombie novel trilogy. I scarcely use my God-given gift at all anymore.

This has to change.

How? Well, that would be something to write about, wouldn’t it?

Holding Out My Hat