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Friends,
Someone wrote me yesterday saying he thought my April Fools post (“Why I’m running”) was in bad taste: “Your lame attempt at humor comes in the middle of a senseless war where casualties are mounting and even children are being killed. A monstrous president’s sadistic agents have so far murdered two Americans and continue to terrorize immigrants. And we are losing our democracy. No laughing matter!”
Well, it was an attempt at humor. And maybe it was a lame one. I apologize to anyone who, like this fellow, thought it in bad taste.
But I need to say something about humor in dark times like this.
We need humor. Trump is no laughing matter but we need relief from the interminable awfulness of him, of his regime, and of the anger and bigotry he’s fueled.
So it’s important that we poke fun — not only at Trump and his lackeys, but also at ourselves.
A few evenings ago, I had dinner with some friends. One related a hilarious story about how he’d met his spouse. Another told about being fired from their first job, and did it in such a self-deprecating way that they had us in stitches. I added in my own follies. We must have laughed for two hours straight. I came home more refreshed than I’d been in weeks.
Don’t get me wrong. I take the issues I care about very seriously. But I try not to take myself too seriously. In times like this, if we can’t have a good laugh once in awhile — including at our own expense — we can easily slide downward into unremitting gloom and doom.
Which is why I sometimes try to lighten these pages with a bit of humor, even if it doesn’t always land exactly right. Or, as Julie Andrews once put it, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
In fact, it’s been known for thousands of years that humor itself can be good for your health. Proverbs 17:22: “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.” Or, if you’d prefer the quintessentially conventional wisdom of the Readers Digest: “Laughter is the best medicine.”
My friends, I know these are dark times. Which is exactly why it’s so important to be on the lookout for ways to lighten it.
Please take care of yourselves, and give a big hug to those you love.
RR
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