Long before Walt Disney assumed room temperature and Disney films underwent politically correct cleansing, there was a song called “Everybody’s Got a Laughin’ Place” from his early film “Song of the South.” It had a big effect on me as a child. Made me wonder if animals actually laughed (hyenas excluded). I still don’t know the answer, but I long ago recognized that “a laughing place” requires a third place to stand.

Without a third place to stand, there is no perspective. And without perspective, you may BE too much a part of a joke to think it’s funny. It’s easier for me to define perspective by what it isn’t than what it is: perspective is what you lose when you are too saturated with something, too much inside it to see it proportionally or in balance. I think that’s pretty much where our divisions are today from sea to shining sea.

The problem is the glasses we’re wearing – the lenses through which we gather information. They may be windows, in a sense, and more significantly they are choke points. There was a time when we put them on to give us an honest, objective view of things, but now they have become filters that only admit choreographed agendas instead, a little like those old theater 3-D glasses that shaped what you saw in a movie. They are faux third places to stand. The lenses I’m describing are the various medias that misinform us, of course. Not just the once sacred trust of objectivity that was the heart and soul of journalism, now long corrupted into activism, but all kinds of media from education to social to cultural.

How long can you stay tuned into medias whose daily distortions undermine a rational world? Before you turn to slashing your wrists, alcohol or calories, maybe the thing to do is call a timeout. Take a seventh-inning stretch. Then find your laughing place for perspective. Not because the status quo isn’t serious. It couldn’t be more serious. But because the only place left for perspective is your common sense and whatever context you can muster from what you know of life apart from media hype, spin and hysteria. And that still may not be enough, especially if you’re relatively young. A recent survey this past 4^th of July revealed that two of three Americans in Gen Z don’t know who America declared Independence from. One in three thought it was from Native Americans. Gen Zers have been binging on this thing called media and all its technological manifestations their entire lives, after all. Many have no third place to stand. No laughing-place perspective. But for those who still do…

Radical extremism and biased media will give you something every hour to make you burst out laughing. Doubtless, you remember a human species where men didn’t menstruate or give birth and you couldn’t be criminalized for ignoring the chosen pronouns for 200+ genders. You’ve witnessed political correctness turn the nation inside out until Alice in Wonderland looks sane and stable by comparison. And it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump makes you hiss or you wear a MAGA hat, four years of TV humor replaced with bitter satire, caricature and ridicule of an orange President who faced impeachment before he ever took office is pretty jolly commentary on entertainment itself. Live audiences don’t laugh at political jibes anymore; they just applaud and ululate. It’s become unwatchable except as derangement therapy, but at least the relentlessness is laughable. Add still more levity from a three-ring Congressional circus that postured with seditious rants, treasonous collusions and show trials over the Russia hoax. And following the debunking of that we have a full-coverage media sequel with extra sessions to report hearsay about hearsay. Hmmm. Does Alice ever break through the looking glass and find her way home? Will Ringmaster Schiff and Queen Pelosi finally triumph over their evil arch nemesis the Orange Marauder? Does Hunter Biden succeed his father as President 46 ½? Tune in to your favorite media for the results of the next election before it happens. And “may the farce be with you”…at least in your laughing place. The bizarre convolutions of group hysteria and journalistic burlesque will be here when you return.

A few days ago, some of our population celebrated our Declaration of Independence, but it is really the signing of the Constitution in 1787 that delivered on its assertions. Nowhere else in world history has there been such a malleable document, subject to orderly process, with checks and balances, all by rule of law. Not changed by riots. Not altered de facto by Presidential, Congressional or institutional refusal to enforce it. Not by social, cultural and news media usurpations. But by Constitutional process.

When Benjamin Franklin came out of Constitutional Hall the day of the signing, and a Mrs. Powel asked her anxious question of what kind of government they had given us, Franklin’s answer was: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” If you can keep it. That’s where we are. Sunrise or sunset? Identified first in our own separate lives, because each of us has a role, as long as our elections are secure. And if we are still that fundamentally positive people known as Americans, the nation as a whole will find its center again. E pluribus unum – out of many, one.

So, postpone your shock and awe at the status quo. Hardly any of it went unpredicted or unforeseen. And America is still a place where you can become anything you want – send Johnny to school in the morning, and he may come back as Mary for dinner. Celebrate or lament that, but however you see it politically, the time to get serious is at the ballot box. By any and all means, preserve your hopes for America to survive; but in the meantime, roll your eyes, watch the clown cars unload, and laugh, laugh, laugh…
 

Photos below are from bike-hike-kayak reveries, plus one of a snowscape in Elm Creek, just to remember what it’s like without bugs and humidity: #1-2 biking; #3-4 kayaking; #5 aforementioned snowscape; #6-9 some old shots of a waterfall nearby; #10-12 the Town Green trail in the middle of Maple Grove in full bloom this month.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan