Creating a Whole New Reality

August 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Despite my extensive research in previous years into ancient civilizations and the mysteries they left behind, I’d never heard of Tartaria until recently. Some days, my online feed is filled with tantalizing tidbits about a super-advanced civilization that lasted until around the turn of the twentieth century when it was buried by a mud flood in a great global reset. To prove their theory, they point to such things as the massive fortress-like buildings that were erected to house the insane, or rather, according to the story, to house those who still remembered the Tartarian world before it was destroyed. Also “proofs” are the incredible cathedrals and government edifices that were seemingly impossible to create in horse-and-buggy times. Those buildings were supposed to be conductors of earth energy, a free energy source that was known once upon a time. Also, so many of these buildings all over the world were created in similar styles, which leads people again down the trail to Tartaria.

As much as I enjoy fun theories, I couldn’t get behind this one. Oh, I do believe in earth energy (something Tesla supposedly proved, though that “proof” disappeared after his death), and many researchers have found connections between cathedrals (if you’re familiar with The DaVinci Code, you know as much as most people about those connections). The half-buried buildings could have come from settling over the centuries (much in the same way that Venice is sinking), rather than a single mud flood.

But despite the cohesion of the theory, I couldn’t buy into it. How could they make a billion people stop believing in what they knew happened?

Well, I have my answer. All I had to do was pay attention to what’s going on today, how the liberals in particular are rewriting history and teaching kids things that simply are not true, or at least not the whole truth. (I’ve written and deleted several examples because all of them would get me called a liar and a racist and a bigot and a whateveraphobic and a bunch of other unsavory things, which would prove my point, but proving a point isn’t worth getting curses called down on my head.)

So, let’s try this one: kids are being taught that this is the worst country in the world, that we are an oppressor civilization, which leads kids to believe we created the whole slave trade when in fact, it had been going on for thousands of years before anyone in this country held a slave, and it continues to this very day. What this country did was make slavery illegal. You can’t teach kids one thing without following through with the rest of the story. Nor can you ignore the hundreds of thousands of white Americans who died to free those slaves. Nor can you shame a country for things that happened before anyone alive today was born, without balancing it out with all the good things that the country subsequently did. We are a country in progress, with each generation trying to improve their lives, their family’s lives, and the lives of their fellow citizens. You leave those important parts out, and what you end up with are a couple of generations who want to tear the whole thing down and make the billionaires pay for everything. And though there are some rich folks using their money to sow discord in this and other countries (and somehow, the money those billionaires have is sacrosanct) others are simply working, providing jobs for people, creating wealth. Wealth is not a pie. When someone creates a successful business, it adds to the prosperity of everyone. But that, too, is something that is left out of the discussion.

So, there begins the erasure of the truth. In future generations, assuming this current crop of neo-socialist/communists don’t rip the country to shreds, that’s what people will believe. They’ll sit on top of the destruction of a country that was built to serve the individual and protect individual rights because they believe the government needs to be in control of everything. (Which is utterly insane. The more money the government has, the more it squanders, the more fraud there is, and the worse off things are.)

Anyway, those future folks will be digging through the ruins, and they will find the Smithsonian Institute and the exhibits (paid for with our hard-earned money) that instead of celebrating this country, tell the story of how terrible we were. And those folks will nod in self-congratulation, and tell themselves that, even though they ended up in rags, they did the right thing by tearing it all down.

This is an exaggeration, of course, and with any luck, we’ll never see that destruction, but my point holds — it is possible to create a whole new reality within a short time. So who’s to say that there wasn’t some kind of great reset that lies forgotten in the not-so-distant past, just as people today are rewriting our own history.

There is one lingering question I have that mention of Tartaria brought to mind: in 1900, our population was only 76 million people, so why were there so many immense buildings erected all over the country to house the insane?

 

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Power and Corruption

August 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram

When I was young, I thought the world would be a lot better off if women were running things. I figured there would be no war, that kindness would prevail, that courts would be fairer, that there would be more empathy, and that government fraud would be reduced to a minimum. Boy, was I delusional!

In my defense, I didn’t really have any facts to base that theory on, just what I knew about women. Mainly me.

Now there are plenty of facts, facts that show up in the news every day and have for the past couple of decades, and it turns out that women are every bit as corrupt and as sociopathic as men, using their positions of power to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, enrich themselves to the detriment to the country, and all the other ways people in poser have of holding themselves above “the deplorables” they hate, as well as their own constituents. And oh, yes . . . as is abundantly apparent when some of the women politicians open their mouths, they are every bit as unintelligent and ignorant as some of the men in politics.

It’s not just politicians and those running political machines, as well as anyone else who carves out a place of power for themselves, but district attorneys and judges, too. It’s no secret why so many of these individuals are women — women make up about 56% of students in law school. I was right — women in such positions are more empathic, but for the wrong side. It used to be that justice favored the victim (or at least it was supposed to), but now “justice” favors the perpetrator. Occasionally victims defending themselves end up in prison instead of the perpetrator. Too often, cops arrest doers, the DA refuses to bring them to trial, and so the criminal ends up back out on the street to do it again. And so more victims. But oh, that poor perpetrator! He had such a terrible life. (Not a word about the victim who now has no life, just a grave and grieving relatives.) Then there’s cashless bail where the perpetrator is released on his own recognizance with no incentive to return for his trial. Even worse, when they are here illegally committing crimes, sometimes the judges even conspire to let the doers go to keep them from being deported.

Why? I have no idea. Perhaps they really are empathic, though judges are supposed to be impartial. Perhaps they really do care, but it’s a killer’s empathy — not just an empathy for killers (because as some judges have said, they can’t convict if they don’t know the reason for the crime) but an empathy that gets innocent people killed. Perhaps they have a greater agenda — greater crime rates increase chaos, and in chaos is power.

As it turns out, women — or rather some women — are every bit as addicted to power as some men. Lord Acton’s belief that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” holds true for women, too. Even if women go into politics or the law or whatever for humanitarian reasons, they begin to believe that they deserve their power, and when their bad actions have no consequences, they begin to believe that they are right no matter how reprehensible they might be. It’s more than that, though. Although power does lessen people’s moral culpability, it seems as if morally ambiguous people — people who are ready and willing to be corrupted — are drawn to positions of power.

Despite the message you might be getting from this blog, the truth is, it doesn’t really matter to me if the powerful, morally ambiguous person is a woman (except that it gives women a bad name). I simply don’t like corrupt people. Period. They take too much power from the rest of us.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, culture, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Human Motivations

August 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I read an article where the author mentioned two powerful human motivations: the need to belong and the need to reduce uncertainty. He was using these motivations to explain why so many young white liberals are voting for communist/socialistic candidates. Apparently, that party gives them the identity and the certainty they need without their ever having to look beyond the belonging to perhaps a different truth than what they “feel” is true. If that’s the case, I can understand the young falling for the fallacy of getting everything for free, but apparently, in a few of the primaries where the socialists have won, even older white liberals have voted for the so-called socialist.

This need to belong is also the reason (rather a reason) why the leftist media so gleefully touts the avalanche of new people joining that party (the membership stands at little over 100,000 which is not much of an avalanche, and yet their wins make it seem so). The reason this is so damaging is that people want to feel as if they are winners, so they jump where they think the winners are, especially if those winners promise free everything. It explains, too, why people don’t always vote for who they really want — they vote for who they think will win. I suppose that’s part of the need for certainty and belonging. If the person they vote for wins, it validates them. If the person loses, it leaves them feeling uncertain about themselves.

You’d think that after a certain age, people would have learned to live with both a feeling of not belonging and a sense of uncertainty, but apparently not. For me, that acceptance came during my years of grief after Jeff died. Since he was my home, and since we did everything together, being left alone catapulted me into free fall, not knowing who I was, where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to be doing. I still don’t know any of those things, and despite my being settled in my own home, I still feel uncertain and alienated at times. Working in a garden helps with accepting that reality, where every day is a lesson in unbelonging (a garden belongs to itself; a gardener is merely a caretaker since so much is beyond human control) and a lesson in uncertainty (there is no guarantee that a seed will grow, that a plant will survive the weather conditions, that hordes of insects won’t come to feast).

I also see another powerful human motivation at play in the political arena — a need to be agreed with. If you belong to a group that validates you, you never have to deal with unbelonging, uncertainly, or being disagreed with. Although I have come to an accommodation with the first two motivations for human behavior, the third is something I still struggle with. Most of what I know has come from serious study, and it tends to irk me when people just wave that off because they “feel” differently, but it’s their prerogative to feel however they want based on their own experiences. I am learning (trying to learn) to simply let their disagreement pass me by, realizing that that what others think has nothing to do with me, but feeling it inside where it counts is something else.

Still, I wish that those understandable motivations aren’t leading so many people toward an economic policy that has never worked before and certainly can’t work today, because if it ever succeeds, then what they think will matter tremendously, no matter what I think.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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An Interesting Quote

August 4, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite quote?
View all responses

This isn’t my favorite quote since I don’t actually have one, but it’s something I read recently that hit a chord.

In the 1960s, psychologist Frank X. Barron set out to discover what made someone a creative thinker. He discovered that creative people seemed to have certain traits in common: independence; unconventionality; a vast inner life; a preference for complexity and ambiguity; a tolerance for disorder; the ability to extract order from chaos; and a willingness to take risks. He concluded:

“Thus the creative genius may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.”

What hit a chord with that quote is that I have many of those attributes while at the same time, I consider myself a rather average person, and certainly no creative genius or any kind of genius, for that matter. (In fact, a teacher once said to me: “I bet you think you have a high IQ, but you don’t. It’s average.” But she did admit I was creative, so there’s that.) I’m pretty much middle of the road in just about everything, and that’s because I can often see both ends to any spectrum, can often even feel both ends.

I consider myself to be logical, but then, there is that other part of me that is more mystical than logical. Both tend to keep me centered in the middle.

I’m not sure about primitive and cultured. I don’t consider myself either, so perhaps that’s another middle of the road thing?

And I am knowledgeable about many things, but unfortunately, I am also aware of huge blanks in my knowledge base where I know there are things to know but don’t know them.

Then there’s the “destructive” part of the quote — though I am constructive when it comes to gardening, for example, pampering my plants for the most part, I can also be extraordinarily destructive. Yesterday, I needed to prune an overgrown bush, but by the time I finished pruning it, there wasn’t much left but the bare trunks and branches that had been hidden in the middle of the foliage, so I destroyed the whole thing. Well, not completely, just chopped it way back so that it would be years before it grew unwieldy again. It certainly helped me get rid of my frustrations with all that’s going on in the world today.

I do think I’m sane, though during most of my younger years, I thought I was crazy. I can’t remember why, now — maybe because I was so different from people I knew, maybe because certain noises made me frantic, or maybe because my mental processes took me places I wasn’t comfortable with. I remember once being terrified of meeting a psychologist who was new to the family because I didn’t want her to be able to see my craziness. Luckily, I never met her, and now it wouldn’t be an issue. Age does wonders for an uncertain mind!

I’m just as glad not to be a creative genius, because being simply me is hard enough.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Useful Folk

August 3, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I saw a video clip the other day that made me think, which I’m sure was not the fellow’s intention since he seems to hate old people and think they should all be done away with. Still, this fellow, with more hardware poked into his face than I have in my toolbox, said that some old guy came up to him, gave him twenty dollars, and suggested he remove the hardware. Rude? Probably? Uncalled for? Well, perhaps. But the question is, why would someone make himself into such a spectacle if he didn’t want to be noticed? Anyway, he ranted on and on about how useless “the boomers” are, without any real knowledge of what the boomer generation is. He said they just sat around and did nothing, which some older folks do, especially those older than the boomers. For the most part, the boomers I know are still working, taking care of grandchildren, volunteering, writing, gardening . . . any number of activities.

It seemed to me that he was not the sort of person to get involved with older folks who are strangers, such as those he’d meet if he were volunteering at a retirement home, so the only way he would know if “the boomers” did nothing but sit around all day was if he knew someone personally, someone perhaps who wouldn’t give him money when he asked. Which made his rant more personal than a sweeping generality, especially since he said he needed gas and the twenty dollars the old boomer gave him was necessary. Which completely negates his rant, because obviously, that old boomer had a particular use and wasn’t worthless to the ranter after all.

Apparently, a lot of the younger generations share his viewpoint about “the boomers” being useless and that they should all be put out of their misery (the misery the young people are feeling, that is, not the misery the old folks probably aren’t feeling). Some people see this attitude as the first step toward generational warfare, which is entirely possible. (Supposedly one of the reasons they hate older folks is they are supporting those “useless” people with their social security taxes, but that there are too few of them to support all of the old people and have money left for themselves. It would seem, then, as if the end — based solely on numbers — would favor the oldsters.) Even some of the self-proclaimed “elder millennial” commentators I used to listen to (emphasis on “used to”) turn out to have that same anti-boomer prejudice, which is funny because they hate being classified as part of the black monolith that’s supposed to be voting democratic, but they see “boomers” as just another faceless monolith.

All of that is preamble to what the hardware guy made me think: Who, actually, deserves to live? Who among us is so worthy of life that everyone else should be eliminated to make room for them? What makes a person worthy of living? What makes one person more useful than another? Is anyone useful, really?

Is a baby contributing to society? Is a kid going to school? What about a person who doesn’t work but manages to get enough handouts to live a life of leisure while pleading poverty? What about the rich folks who are funding the subversive movements in this country? What about the fraudsters? What about the teachers who propagandize rather than teach kids to think? What about the university bigwigs who take money from enemies of the United States to further propagandize the students? What about the scientists who develop drugs and other substances to keep people on a medical treadmill? What about the “experts” who make up the news — or slant it — rather than simply reporting it? What about the editors who decide what we are too stupid to understand? What about the commentators who spew innuendo with straight faces?

If we were to do away with all the worthless folk, the only ones left would be you and me, and I sometimes wonder about you.

[Sorry, I couldn’t resist. That’s something my dad would say to me when I was young: “All the world’s crazy but you and me, and I sometimes wonder about you.” He sure did think that was funny!]

Despite that last facetious remark, there is a tinge of truth to it. In my case, I might not still be working at a paying job, but I am working in my garden, which gives a lot of people pleasure —my neighbors, people walking by, people driving past on purpose to see what I am doing. When I do see people, I always have a smile or a kind word or a hug to give away. I might not be contributing much to the economy, but I leave behind barely perceptible footprints: I live on a miniscule income, drive as little as possible, don’t waste food or much of anything. I just try to live a quiet life of peace, which adds to the entire mantle of peace that perhaps protects us.

Who’s to say that’s not as important as . . . well, as anything that’s important, if there is anything that’s important.

So, to turn the tables on the ranter, perhaps by giving me something to think about, he actually turned out to be one of the useful folk.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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White Supremacy Culture?

July 22, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I read something yesterday that so shocked me, I’ve spent the past hour backtracking my digital footprints to make sure that what I thought I read was actually what I read. And it is.

So, the House Oversight Committee is questioning the Smithsonian bias, especially the exhibits in the National Museum of American History, which apparently is following through with the leftist agenda of emphasizing the country’s historical oppression and wickedness rather than anything patriotic.

I understand that the oppression is part of the back story, but it isn’t the entire story. Nor do past oppressions define where we are today. This is like people judging me by what my great-grandfather did. He apparently had two wives, though not at the same time, at least I don’t think he did. One he threw down the stairs, the other he locked away in an insane asylum. He was also a scientist of note, working with Edison and others of that ilk. So what does any of that say about me and my family today? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Still, the museum’s emphasis on framing history as oppressors/oppressed is typical of what is going on today, so that didn’t shock me. What did is something that came out during the hearing. Apparently, the Smithsonian uses something called a Mass Action Toolkit (MASS = Museum as Site for Social Action) to ensure that the museum promotes equity, inclusion, and anti-oppression and that it focuses on transforming society, which quite frankly, should not be the museum’s mission, especially one predominately funded by taxpayer money. (Hence the hearing.)

And even that isn’t shocking. The whole world, it seems, wants to be able to do what they want on the taxpayer’s dime.

So, the shocking part: the Smithsonian’s Mass Action Toolkit lists politeness, objectivity, individualism, linear thinking, planning for the future, avoiding conflicts, managing time, protecting property, a sense of urgency, and worship of the written word as characteristics of white supremacy culture.

What??? Politeness? Objectivity? Individualism? Linear thinking? Planning for the future? Being on time? Those are characteristics of white supremacy? No. No. No. They are characteristics of a civilized person, someone who strives to be decent and who treats others as they want to be treated. Those aren’t white things, nor are they bad things. Those should be characteristics for everyone to strive for. As for “a sense of urgency.” I have no idea what that means, nor do I know why the written word is a problem, unless it’s because too many people don’t know how to read.

Who makes up this stuff? Who believes it? And what is anyone supposed to do about it? Start being rude? Learn how not to read? Give up our individualism and follow the crowd even if it’s leading us off a political cliff? Become as biased as those who are aligned against anything that might be considered white culture? And what the heck is “white supremacy culture,” anyway? Just being white? Just existing?

Even writing this, I find the whole thing shocking and disturbing and unbelievable, but apparently, this nonsense is being sold as truth.

I’m going out to work in my garden. That, at least, makes sense to me.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Singing Our Laws

July 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

People have often used songs and rhymes as memory aids. In fact, I still have to run through that ditty we learned in grade school when I need to know how many days in a month. You know the one:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February at twenty-eight,
But leap year, coming once in four,
February then has one day more.

To be honest, I only remember the first four lines; I had to look up the mnemonic to find out the last lines because I never need them. I know how many days February has.

A memory song we learned was the alphabet song, though again, I don’t need to ever sing it (and the world thanks me for that small favor) because I do know the alphabet.

Something I didn’t know until just now when I read it, was that in a lot of previous societies, laws were written in verse so that they could be sung in public places to inform people of the rules, and also so that they could be handed down the generations without the usual tendency of people to unwittingly change what they heard.

This made me smile, thinking about doing such a thing today. Can you imagine? We are long past the days of Moses’ 10 laws and Hammurabi’s 282. In fact, we have so many laws, they are uncountable beyond a guess that they are in the many millions, which makes sense when you consider that the Federal government, state governments, and some city governments all have dedicated legislative branches that do nothing but make up laws to pass. Often, those laws become obsolete, such as any laws pertaining to horses and buggies, though they are seldom removed from the books. More frequently, laws are piled one on top the other, though the first law, if upheld, would do the job. Such as insider trading. There are laws against insider trading, but apparently, Congress excused themselves from those laws (how, I don’t know), so now, if they really want to ban insider trading, they have to create new laws to ban something that is already banned. In addition to laws (or under the heading of law might be a better phrasing), there are millions of statutes and regulations. And any ruling by a judge in a trial becomes law if only by precedent.

So, all those laws now extant in the United States. How long to you think it would take to sing that song? Decades? And if they were all etched in stone like Hammurabi’s code, how many times would the necessary stone tablets encircle the earth?

Enquiring minds are simply . . . enquiring.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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All the World’s a Stage

July 10, 2026 — Pat Bertram

It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of politics as identity and identity as ideology. Somehow, I thought people were bright enough to stand apart from what they believed, to see themselves as a person believing a thing, not believing that they were the thing believed. But apparently not. When some people buy into a political ideology, they identify with that ideology, and when the ideology is attacked, they think that they themselves are being attacked, not just their idea.

I can’t imagine holding any idea so strongly that a destruction of that belief would destroy me, but that is not the case with a lot of people. Decades ago in a theology class, the teacher broke down everything we believed. His intent, if I remember correctly, was to make us rethink what we thought we knew. To get us to start building up a new way of thinking. Before he got to that point though, a student in the class got really upset, and told him he was destroying everything we believed without giving us anything to replace it. It was as if he had destroyed us, since those beliefs were the foundation of our lives until then, and most of the class were as upset as that one student, but it didn’t bother me. It was just something else to learn, is all. (As far as I was concerned, nothing I learned in school was ever about me. It was just the curriculum.)

To be honest, that’s the only thing about that class I remember. Well, there was one other odd thing that has stuck in my mind all these years. He taught that “Love is the movement of an appetite toward a recognized good.” (His exact words.) I think the discussion that day centered on the supposition that if this were true, then what we think of love is really like and vice versa. But the upshot of that class is lost in the shadows of time. Or rather, in the shadows of my mind. Odd that I remembered those two bits.

A more recent example comes from The Wheel of Time. In the books, there is a people, a warrior society, that takes their entire identity from their belief that they were always warriors, that what sets them apart from others and makes them morally superior is that they use spears rather than swords, their thinking being that spears can also be used for hunting while swords can only be used to kill other humans. When this ideology was proven false, a huge percentage of those people couldn’t handle it and ran away, not just from their culture but from themselves. (It often seems to me that these books are a brand-new allegory instead of a decades-old fantasy series.)

The odd thing is that the story of this warrior society helps me understand many politically motivated people today, while at the same time, these people today help me understand the people in this warrior society.

Another odd thing is that in the book, the chiefs of this society knew that the destruction of their beliefs and their people had been prophesied, but as a chief said, “It’s one thing to know prophesy will be fulfilled eventually, another to see that fulfillment before your very eyes.”

This statement certainly rings true to me. It’s one thing to spend a lifetime studying “prophesy,” aka history, both overt and hidden, and to know that one day we will be balanced on the knife edge of keeping our country a constitutional republic or turning into another sociologic cesspool, but seeing it happen before my eyes is . . . disheartening. It’s also weird to see all the political, global, and economic machinations that had been going on behind the scenes my whole life, suddenly appearing on stage as if it’s no big deal. I’d always presumed I’d be gone by the time this new world order would be put into effect, but it’s happening faster than I expected. I try to look at it as seeing history in the making — both the push toward socialism and the pushback of the republic — but it’s hard to continue to see it all as “out there.” It comes too close, at times.

Still, whatever happens, I will still be me. My identity is only as a truth seeker, not as a victim or oppressor. (And even “truth seeker” is only a surface identity. I am . . . me. Period. I am not my ideas. Not my writing. I’m just me. No further definition needed.) And, if I am being truthful, there is a chance I will never see the fruition of this current push since part of the “ideology” has always been to get rid of the old folks who are perceived by the young as using up too many resources without contributing anything.

But who knows. The curtain is up. The play is still going on, and we have yet to discover the plot.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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78 Degrees

July 3, 2026 — Pat Bertram

There’s not much to laugh about when it comes to socialistic energy restrictions, or even simply grids so old that such restrictions are necessary, but I do find the current 78˚ restriction in some places amusing. For most of my life, despite living in the intense heat of Colorado summers, I didn’t have air conditioning at all, so 90+ temperatures in the house weren’t that uncommon. I’ve also lived a couple of places with air conditioning, but the person in control of the thermostat blasted air into the room so icy that I had to close the vents.

Now that I have air-conditioning and control of the thermostat, I have it set at 80. Sometimes, if I’m hot, I’ll lower it to 79, especially since my “office” is the least cool room in the house, but usually the room fan works as well as lowering the temperature.

Even if this weren’t a temperature I could get used to, I’d probably do it anyway. During my years (decades!) of no air-conditioning, I learned that the warmer the inside temperature, the less impact walking out into the heat has on one’s system. Going from hot to a blasting air-conditioner or from refrigerated air to extreme heat can be dangerous. For most people, the physiological stress is brief, but for others, it can strain the heart and worsen cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. And even if it weren’t dangerous, it’s easier to adapt to the outside temperature when the difference isn’t so great.

Too be honest, though, if a communist mayor were to tell me to raise my thermostat to 78˚, I’d lower my usual temperature to that setting just as a rebellion.

Or maybe not. Paying out money I don’t have to make a point seems silly. And anyway, I prefer to be able to set the temperature to my preference even if it does fit into someone else’s agenda. Having the choice is something to celebrate, especially during this holiday weekend when we’re celebrating 250 years of freedom.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in culture, dealing with old age, home, life, writing. Tags: , , . 6 Comments »

Hope

June 30, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I don’t really pay attention to generation labels. I mean, I know what a couple of the names are, but I haven’t a clue as to where they fall in the age spectrum (my age spectrum, specifically), or what, if anything, any of those groups want. I also don’t know what the ethos of each group is, assuming there is such a thing. I can see certain characteristics, such as people having grown up using phones as a child, or their feeling a sense of doom or lack of hope for the future, but not everyone in any particular generation is the same. For example, while there could be a lot of clownishly-dressed protestors in a particular generation, there could also be what used to be called “clean cut” people trying to create a different life for themselves.

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of contact with the youngest generations, and when I do, they are generally respectful. I’m also aware that a whole lot of younger people follow the socialist party line of “billionaires bad, trillionaires worse.” But then again, so do a lot of people of all ages. Too many people are totally ignorant about how money is made and how wealth is created. Wealth is not a single pie of limited size, as they seem to presume. Every wealth creator (people who own businesses and who work at them) adds to the size of the pie, which benefits everyone. And even if those wealth creators were taxed out of existence, not much, if any, of that money will end up in the hands of those ignorant folk. There are too many grifters out there already standing in line with their hands out.

I also know that a lot of younger generations are unpatriotic; apparently many see the country as a hellhole with no redeeming characteristics. But then, so do a lot of the older generations. Outrage seems to be the name of their game, and algorithms only feed their insularity. Others are simply apathetic.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing a different side of those young folks. Two young men started “Relay for America,” a run to carry the flag from the Pacific Coast to Washington DC — keeping that flag moving day and night, without stopping. Over 250 official relay runners have signed up, and others join them along the route. Each mile is dedicated to a veteran. Their hope is to unite America with this show of patriotism and community.

Another couple of young men (one who has entirely too much energy and soles of leather since he runs barefoot) started a running club called Unify America. They travel to various places, run with a flag, hoping to spread their message of love and joy and patriotism.

Recently, the second group joined the first for part of the relay. Symbolic, that.

This show of patriotism, fitness, and solidarity gives me hope. Perhaps the communist ideals creeping through the country are not a foregone conclusion. Perhaps there is a spiritual, maybe even a political, balance at play.

Another thing that gives me hope is the rise of independent journalism. Young people with phones and cameras and a steadfast desire to tell the truth are a perfect foil for the propaganda of the alphabet press. Instead of sitting in air-conditioned studios parroting the approved stories, those young journalists are out there, standing on their own two shod feet, showing what the established press doesn’t want us to see.

Even if they’re not out gathering their own stories, there is a growing group of conservative podcasters who try to dispel the lies that are so often peddled by far-left extremists, especially those of a similar age, and to tell the truth as they live it.

It’s good to know that these young men and women are out there. They bring hope to world. And to me.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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