Rabid Dog Days of August

Yawn.

I flipped on the TV this morning, and there was Rudy Giuliani, foaming at the mouth. Hizzoner the mayor, the post 9/11 publicity hound and griever in chief, and rebuilder in chief, no matter what the human cost. Spewing gossipy accusations as if the former prosecutor in chief had never heard the word "hearsay."

Kate Foster. A name I had never heard before. Hers was to be the next story, as soon as they wiped Rudy's spit off the camera lenses. A gymnast with a prosthetic leg, having lost her real one to disease only a few years earlier, a teenager who competes, against all odds and without complaint, in a system rigged, I suppose, in favor of athletes with all their limbs. Shame on all of us, but shame on everyone in this surreal political season who has cried foul when it appears they might not get their way.

I watched the segment in amazement, this talented young girl who had lost one of the indispensable tools of her trade, never mind the years of debilitating treatment she had to endure, never mind the devastation and fear that we, as parents, don't want to imagine. With the help of a coach who never, for a moment, viewed the loss of a leg as a deal breaker, Kate Foster seems to live life, on the mat and off, with a grace I only wish I could approach when I drag my aging ass out of bed in the morning.

Yawn. The Kate segment ended quickly, and the pundits reappeared. At least Rudy was gone. No shortage, though, of video clips of the Oompa-Loompa in chief -- calling names, hurling insults, reading scripted endorsements as if they were written in Arabic and periodically ad libbing with the small handful of adjectives in his vocabulary -- incredible, terrific, disgraceful, crooked. 

Yawn, yes, but we cannot seem to get enough. And as much as the rational pieces of us push away the nastiness and the hate and the fear mongering, it has permeated our collective psyche and made us angry and has certainly made us forget about the things that matter.

Life isn't fair. If I hadn't known that before, I certainly grasped it in January, when a young man I had watched grow up simply died, without warning, at twenty-seven. Nobody was driving while distracted, nobody was shooting up a club with an assault rifle. His heart failed him, and this young man who traveled the world and loved life and who quietly inspired so many in his short life by working hard and doing good things and appreciating his good fortune and always, always, paying it forward was taken. Had the system been rigged, we would have expected somebody like Adam to live forever.

Had his heart problem been discovered, he might have lived, with some limitations. His activity level might have been curtailed. But, like Kate Foster, the one-legged gymnast, he would have persevered and he would have prospered and he would never have dwelt on the unfairness of it all. Even with a defective heart, Adam would have been as big hearted as ever. He would have shaken his head in disbelief at the spectacle that is American politics this year. Still, he would have believed the world is a good place.

I like to think that Kate and Adam -- and their parents -- are the rule, not the exception, and that the Oompa-Loompa's will soon fade back into fiction. Yawn. It's getting really old.