The Debate: Trump Weirdly Lies about Immigrants Eating Pets & Is Elon Musk a Clear and Present Danger to Democracy?
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Today’s quote teaches us how to put our insecurities into perspective—and make them fade away.
A Few Thoughts about the Debate—and Beyond: Yes, Kamala won by a wide margin. But does it matter? It didn’t for Hillary Clinton.
Elon Musk’s misleading election claims reach millions and alarm election officials: Musk is one of the leading dispensers of misinformation that has begun to affect the integrity of voting—and democracy. Bonus: Trump offers Musk a government job and Musk offers to impregnate Taylor Swift after she endorses Harris.
Police are questioning Florida voters about signing an abortion rights ballot petition: Police are being sent to homes to intimidate people who signed a petition to bring abortion to the ballot. Has that become the American Way now, or just the Florida Way?
MAGA Republicans Accuse Immigrants of Eating Pets: Sure, it’s a lie that even the police have disproved. But that doesn’t stop Trump, Vance, and other Republicans from putting immigrants’ lives in danger.
Kareem’s Video Break: I’ve watched it five times, each time with my mouth hanging open in amazement and admiration.
Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents: A growing number of children are completely cutting themselves off from their parents.
Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell Sing “You're All I Need to Get By”: Their duets were classic Motown soul.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Breathe, darling. This is just a chapter. It’s not your whole story.
S.C. Lourie, self-help author of The Power of Mess
It’s embarrassing to be my age and still have minor things agitate or annoy me to the point that I keep thinking about them long after I should have moved on. Knowing better and feeling better are two different things and they don’t always go hand in hand. I know that whatever is bothering me is, in the scope of the universe, insignificant. Yet, there I am playing it over and over in my mind. I don’t have to provide too many examples because I’m pretty sure every reader has a plethora of their own examples. A perceived slight by a friend. Finding out you were excluded from an activity. Thinking about something you did in the past that you feel guilty about, even though no one else involved probably even remembers it. The list of how we unnecessarily torture ourselves is long and relentless.
There’s a technique in painting and photography called “forced perspective” which is an optical illusion to make objects appear closer, farther away, bigger, or smaller than they actually are. People unwittingly use this same technique every day to make incidents bigger and more threatening than they are. There are a lot of reasons for this: Aging can amplify fears of being alone, past traumas can make us see red flags in others that aren’t there, and a history of failed relationships can make everyone seem villainous.
These anxieties are unavoidable. But there is one invaluable lesson that aging has taught me: This, too, will end. That’s a filter I can put on the lens with which I view my daily existence and, though it doesn’t protect me against those paranoid feelings, it does make them go away sooner. An antibiotic isn’t a vaccine, but it does lessen the length of one’s suffering. Remembering that whatever happened is just a chapter, not my whole story is an effective way of reminding myself that one scene—good or bad—does not make the whole story good or bad. We are the writers, so we can be the authors of our own happy ending.