I remember when I was maybe five or six and we were all caught up in the space race. It was the early sixties  and kids back then had no electronics but we sure did have an imagination. I spent many a day being an astronaut. Sometimes I was a cowboy. Sometimes I was a soldier. We called it playing. Adults called it pretending.

Even though the land of make believe would have been an awesome place to stay, there came a time when the pretending had to stop. Why? Why couldn’t I live my life, fed by imagination and fantasy, carefree from then until now? Because, with only a minimal amount of prodding, I became an adult. Real life became more interesting than running through the yard pretending to be an airplane.

Here is the thing about not knowing when to give playing up, there is a world out there that has both feet squarely planted in reality. Even if you have a large army of folks on your side, you won’t win. You can say that you are black but if your mom and dad and brothers and sisters are white, somebody is going to call you out. Same if you self identify / pretend to be an Indian, dog, cat, horse, dolphin or another gender. It isn’t hate speech just because I refuse to pretend either. Just maybe I like to pretend to be an adult and call it like I see it. How about them apples?

But we have allowed this sham to go on for so long that like a cancer, it has infected every walk of life. For over six months we have allowed grown men and women to behave like angry children who didn’t get their way in the checkout line at Walmart. They wanted Bernie but they got Hillary. Then they wanted Hillary but others wanted Trump and they didn’t win. Whaaaaaaa, somebody cheated and I don’t mean Hillary…. wait, OK, maybe she did, but not like he did. Not like that. So it was the Russians. And they are playing hard but reality keeps popping up so they have to beat reality down. So they pretend that they are fighting monsters….

An then somebody tries to kill a baseball field full of republican congressmen….

And all of Washington pretends that they haven’t been inciting this and stoking the fire for months, but reality is calling you out. 

And some of us are praying for honesty. I hope we are not beaten down.

ws