Doom and gloom at the seawall in Cayucos

November 11, 2024

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” is currently on Amazon.

This one hurt. As a person from high school on who felt involved in politics, much of my ego and idealism has been tied up in whomever I believed in and voted for. Over the years, you win a few and lose a few, and usually know who is going to win because you feel the tide of momentum. So, I was pretty sure Trump was going to win this one, and it was only a matter of how big.

Well, it was a demolition of not only the Democratic Party and their beliefs, but mine as well. A brutal loss.

As an athlete who played all three major American sports at a respectable level and has been characterized by my peers as a “psycho competitor,” I feel like a loser on the losing side. A member of the team of losers, feeling squelched and pretty much demoralized and finished—at least for some time. And maybe I’m liable and weak like my team and suffer from a dose of self-delusion about some of the nonsense they believe in.

Feeling and hoping it had to be a miracle for Harris to win, I refused to watch the news on election night, dreading the situation. In the morning when I read the doom and gloom emails from my cousin and a couple friends and my sister, I quickly escaped to the Cayucos seawall, where fellow so-called wimpy woke coastal elites congregated, and nobody was happy, some were in shock, and nobody could find their sense of humor, which illuminated just how deep the misery was.

Later on I found some, advising my cohorts to get on You Tube and dig up some George Carlin shows, especially the one on “a life worth losing.” George saw it all, claiming “they’re gonna come after your social security, and you know what, they’re gonna get it, so they can give it to their rich friends.”

Well, maybe not. But my conclusion, having been around for over 80 years, is that human beings are a flawed, troubled, sometimes tortured lot, almost all of us psychologically fouled up, either from the stress of our environments or the way we’ve been raised, and so the ongoing political scene is going to always be a chaotic mess, but somehow hopefully manageable.

But now?

Some of us talked about leaving the country. Nah, not at this point, and probably never because I live in paradise, and I like a good fight. Sometimes you’ve got to look in the mirror, take stock, be honest about yourself, regroup, stick around and slug it out, and admit that this time the orange messiah and his tribe went to war both verbally and viciously, while the dems and libs, as usual, conducted themselves like fair-minded pansies.

It’s a dirty, filthy, nasty, demagogic, underhanded game. Politics is war, winning at all costs, any way possible, and there’s no referees, dummies. And today, it is a more virulent war than ever before, with the ammunition to make it really ugly and hideous.

So, here’s to the team that knows how to win.

“We are a team that got the shit kicked out of us,” I told one of one of my fellow coastal elites, a former all American college athlete and Boston Red Sox zealot who loathes the New York Yankees. He nodded glumly.

A couple members of a book club I belong were there, and they could not talk about it. Only the dogs didn’t feel the pain, the panic, the despair, and fear of the future.

They snapped up their treats and wagged their tales and begged for more, failing to notice the forlorn expressions and slumped shoulders surrounding them.

Some of the wimpy woke coastal elites expressed commentary, like this: “What do you expect? You think the other half of the country is going to vote for a half black, half Indian woman who’s from Cali-for-nee-ah?”

“What a bunch of dummies.”

George Carlin would agree.

And: “We’re a racist country.”

Well, here’s my take: When Russia tried to become a democracy, it didn’t work, because they were too used to centuries of authoritarian regimes, for taking orders, falling in line, etc, and never could adjust and went straight back to a despot within ten years.

We are grounded and indoctrinated to freedom and democracy and being able to say and do what we damn well please, and it’s going to take some kind of monstrous stuff to cow the fire in the hearts of the beast within us, by which I mean all of us.

So stay tuned, it’s going to be interesting and perhaps gory.