How many of you are dealing with this?
You’re having conversations with family, friends and associates that are supposed to be uplifting and positive, but they start to meander and dissolve into comments about sad events of the day and the ongoing tide of coming out of Washington, D.C.
There’s simply no breathing space for what used to be hours of sitting around chatting about the past, good times, sports and positive thoughts. The conversations are becoming more dire, resulting from the rapid and bizarre rants and troubling minute-to-minute shifting decisions from the White House.
Tariffs. Did you know much about them months ago? Thousands of people losing their jobs and families being battered at the whim of a billionaire.
It’s troubling, and try as you might, you can’t get away from it anywhere.
Ed Pratt
It makes me think of the late Rev. Timothy Wright’s “Trouble Don’t Last Always.” The song is probably sung in virtually every Black Baptist church in the U.S. Its short verses speak to what’s going in the country and across the table right now.
Here’s a bit of the song: “I’m so glad trouble don’t last always. I’m so glad. Weeping may endure for a night. Keep the faith, it will be all right.”
Man, I want to believe in that.
Sitting around Monday evening with some fellas, we began our usual moments of laughing and joking about goings-on in our past. That’s what a bunch of older guys do when given enough time to reflect.
But that came to a sudden halt and drifted to serious talk of the violence here in Baton Rouge and nearby areas, involving children killing children over arguments that mean nothing in the big picture.
There was a bit of defeatism in the conversation about ending the violence. The hope is to find a means to bring a major reduction. The understanding is that this will be tough.
As one guy said, “You can’t get a moment to breathe before some other stupid s---happens.”
But nothing compares to friendly conversations going up in flames ignited by the lit match of the President Donald Trump + DOGE Elon Musk systematic destruction of jobs, funding for low-income families, health care and education programs.
Then there is the talk of tariffs and how people will be affected. Most folk don’t know what tariffs mean, but they know “it just sounds bad,” a friend said.
Well, that’s OK because some in the president’s administration can’t explain it. On the day I was writing this, the president’s press secretary got it wrong about who pays for tariffs.
The uncertainty and the feeling of impending hardships are dominating conversations online, before and after church services, in the middle of card games and among co-workers in offices across the country.
The fear is palpable, and why not? In one conversation, a guy asked how some long-standing businesses and young entrepreneurs survive with hundreds of thousands of people being thrown out of work.
What happens with cuts to programs that feed children and protect them from illnesses? And then there’s the thought of how many of these cuts may lead to increased homelessness, crime and even the breakup of families.
Remember these conversations are taking the place of fun chats about movies, vacations and things that happened while shopping.
You try to sit and watch a basketball game, and a bulletin comes across the screen about tariffs on and off, or government departments being shredded and workers fired, or threats to ignore or lop off one branch of government to make it easy for the president to make his worrisome vision a reality.
Dale Carnegie wrote: “Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” I say no way folks worried about or saw something like this coming yesterday.
But we can hope that Rev. Wright’s song is right that “trouble don’t last always.”