While I'm sure the band in absolutely no way agrees with most, if not all, of my political leanings, the critiques they raise about the music industry in the song could serve just as well as many of the questions I want to ask of legacy mainstream media and politicians from both sides of the aisle in our government.

Leading those questions, for me, is this one: Doesn't it elicit a hopeless feeling sometimes that we always have to learn the hard way in this country?

Few things are surer than taxes and death, but one of them is that our powers that be will make up any excuses necessary, scapegoat anything possible, and generally exercise every single possible wrong decision before reluctantly realizing that a consequential, uncomfortable yet important, proactive adult decision needs to be made and/or communicated to the American public.

Nobody ever wants to fess up to doing something wrong and nobody has a tolerance for even an ounce of discomfort, even when it accompanies an obvious decision that is in the best interest of our nation.

There have been too many examples in recent memory to name, but one of the latest bouts of us acting like a scared 6 year old with an aversion to reality was the farce of the Fed and Biden administration constantly telling the nation that inflation was transitory, when that has turned out to be the polar opposite of the truth.

Zooming out from the inflation farce, monetary policy in general is another example of our inability to digest even subatomic amounts of bad news. We would rather pile on larger and larger tranches of quantitative easing, flying blind and ignorant of the potential consequences of our novel virus of a monetary policy experiment, than deal with the reality—or even the thought—of a recession.

Captain O'Connell said it best in Armed and Dangerous:

"The world is a sh*thole, full of sh*tty little scumbags, who are scared sh*tless."