The Purposeful Bleakness

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Things certainly seem bleak right now.  Democrats have apparently fallen off a cliff and are nominating people that are more than moving the Overton window – they are blowing it up altogether.  The news media is relentless in its reporting of bad news.  I go to church and I hear about the poor, starving and homeless, but nary of word of blessing.  It stands in sharp contrast to the world I live in day-to-day – surrounded by friends, living in natural splendor.  It is as if our politicians and our media are conspiring to prevent me from enjoying my life.

This observation came home to me in an extraordinarily pointed fashion this past weekend.  If you spent the weekend under a rock, you may not have known that the last big event to celebrate the nations 250th happened over the weekend – there was an Indycar race through the streets of Washington, D.C.  Now I grew up in Indianapolis, which means I was spoon fed and intravenously dosed with two things – basketball and auto racing.  Growing up, the Indy 500 season, the month of May, was the most wonderful time of year.  The weather was, finally, turning warm and nice and there just was no better way to spend a day than at “the track” (The Indianapolis Motor Speedway.)  I could tell tales of adventures and encounters and wonders of my youth experienced at that place for days, but I will suffice to say that it was simply joyful and the very stuff of boyhood.  Hot dogs, fried chicken, noise and speed – it just doesn’t get much better.

Watching that race through the streets of D.C. touched all of that in me and more.  It was America, in a nutshell.  As Christopher Jacobs said in The Federalist, “Freedom 250 Grand Prix Brings Heartland American Culture To Deep-Blue D.C.”  I recalled all my elitist college profs that would tell me I was wasting my time when I blew off class to head to the track.  But they didn’t have a leg to stand on when I still got an “A” in their class – due in no small part to the fact that the joy and happiness I experienced at the track energized my studies in a way staying and slogging through never could.

But so many, it seems, want to rob us of our joy.  Adam Schiff for example:

Schiff criticized Trump for ordering the Washington race by executive order and accused the president of using the motorsports “spectacle” to distract Americans from higher costs and policy failures.

Of course he did.  I look at my social media accounts and note how so many I know, suffering from T.D.S., can no longer see how good they actually have it, blinded to that reality by their contempt for the president.

Our politics have to change.  People like Adam Schiff will stop at nothing to win elections and enact policies.  They are more than willing to steal our joy and happiness to do so.  The Declaration of Independence states that the pursuit of happiness is one of the inalienable rights granted to us by our Creator.  Too many of our politicians have forgotten that.