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Here’s a regrettable trend: as profanity has become commonplace, swear words are losing their usefulness.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the language used in movies and television has gotten dramatically more profane .

There are a couple of reasons why.

First is the rise of subscription-based streaming television, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. The Journal explains that video-on-demand services don’t have to comply with strict FCC profanity rules that are imposed on broadcast television and radio programming.

Chad Michael, CEO of content-filtering service EnjoyMoviesYourWay.com, tells the Journal that the more that profanity occurs on subscription shows, the more numb we all become to it, which gives the writers license to use swear words even more.

And, gadzooks, they’re using swear words lots more!

The Journal reports that after scanning more than 60,000 popular movies and TV shows released since 1985, engineers at EnjoyMoviesYourWay.com documented a massive increase in the use of dirty words: The F-word went from 511 in 1985 to 22,177 in November of this year as the S-word went from 484 in 1985 to 10,864 in November.

Which brings us to the second reason why profanity is so daggone common: our social rules are breaking down.

San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge conducted a study in 2017 that explored the use of the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” featured in comedian George Carlin’s famous 1972 monologue.

She found that books published between 2005 and 2008 showed a 28-fold increase in the use of the seven dirty words over books published in the early 1950s.

She said the dramatic increase in cussing could be blamed on growing individualism, which is “a cultural system that emphasizes the self more and social rules less.”

Twenge says that “as social rules fell by the wayside, and people were told to express themselves, swearing became more common.”

In other words, as social taboos give way to individual wants, needs and expression, dropping the F-bomb in public has become no big deal.

What’s worse is that as more self-expressers cuss, the more that cuss words lose their wonderful shock power!

Well, fudge nuggets to that!

Look, swearing can be useful.

A National Library of Medicine study shows that swearing increases stress and pain tolerance — a practice that certainly helps me get through cable news reports.

If you want to know the truth, people who swear are more honest, according to a Sage Journals study.

“Profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and with higher integrity at the society level,” concludes the study’s authors.

And let’s not forget that people who swear frequently are smarter than people who do not, reports U.S. News and World Report.

Mega-cursers tend to know more words, but choose curse words because they pack more linguistic clarity and punch.

As a highly practiced purveyor of the salty tongue, I beg my amateur cussing friends — and the swear-happy streaming-content writers — to stop the ubiquitous cussing.

Goshdarnit, swearing has been around for centuries and every culture has had taboo terms that children would get their mouths washed out with soap and water for daring to speak.

There’s only one way for us to make crude words vulgar again.

We must use them sparingly and classify them as taboo again.

It’s our only hope to restore the sanctity of one of our culture’s most prized resources: our profanity!

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

Here’s an unpleasant holiday statistic: Average Americans are giving significantly less to their favorite charities this year than they did just four or five years ago.

Average Americans have long been among the most generous people on Earth.

But this year, thanks to an economy disrupted by covid, soaring interest rates and three years of high inflation, many are unable to give.

Americans are hurting in their pocketbooks.

This past year credit-card debt jumped faster than ever before in history, reports Business Insider, as more Americans are borrowing at high interest rates just to meet their daily living needs.

An increasing number of people are taking hardship withdrawals out of their 401K savings accounts, reports CNBC — tapping their future retirement funds to pay bills they are unable to afford today.

As a result of these financial troubles, a regrettable shift in charitable giving has occurred.

When I last wrote about giving in America in 2017, the people who gave the most, as a percentage of their wealth, weren’t the richest Americans.

They weren’t even middle-class Americans.

They were the people on the lower end of the economic scale — people who gave almost 30 percent more of their income to charity than any other income bracket.

That changed in 2020 when covid lockdowns wreaked havoc on the economy.

Before that, according to Gallup, more than 80% of U.S. adults said they donated money to a religious or other type of charity.

But in 2023, regrettably, individual giving has dipped to about 70% — and the biggest drop-off has happened among America’s lowest earners.

About 73% of people who earned under $40,000 in 2017 gave what they could to charities.

During the peak of covid in 2020, that percentage fell to 53% and still remains low — which is heartbreaking, because no group of people understands the joy of giving to others better than America’s most humble earners.

While our lowest earners are struggling the hardest in a difficult economy — and therefore are giving less — another group is making up the shortfall: America’s extremely well off.

Americans with a household net worth of more than $1 million, or those who make more than $200,000 per year, are giving 19% more now than before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the AP.

Barrons reports that the landscape of philanthropy has shifted from average individuals giving, say, to The Salvation Army, to wealthy nonprofits and corporations that may be more interested in using their sizable funds to promote the latest popular cause or “systemic societal change.”

Private charity in all its forms is welcome.

But if we want more of the kind that helps the less-fortunate individuals and families who need it most, we need to reverse the incredible damage government policy has done to our economy.

A good start would be to end the spendthrift fiscal and monetary policies that cause inflation and interest rates to spike.

Let’s help our lowest earners get their heads back above water so they can experience the joy of giving again every Christmas.

After all, they know how to spread the joy of giving better than anyone — by helping a needy neighbor pay their utility bills or making sure the neediest children have presents to open on Christmas morning.

Merry Christmas!

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

Tipping demands sure have gotten out of control.

With every purchase you make — at coffee shops, fast food restaurants, chain stores and more — you are presented with a digital payment screen that asks you to leave a tip.

On one hand you feel guilted into leaving a tip, because the person who just rang up your purchase is staring directly at you.

On the other hand, you wonder how in the world did we get to a place in which workers in so many different roles — even plumbers and mechanics — are suddenly expecting extra money just for doing their jobs?

According to USA Today, the history of tipping has unclear origins, but “likely began as a result of the caste system in Europe in the late Middle Ages.”

Prior to 1840, there was no tipping in the United States, according to the book “Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities.”

“Wealthy Americans are thought to have brought tipping back to the United States from lavish trips to Europe in the years leading up to the Civil War,” according to the book.

Initially, tipping was considered un-American because it was classist, according to the book “Forked,” which explores tipping practices in the restaurant industry.

After the Civil War, however, “formerly enslaved people were able to find most of their work in food service or as railroad porters, jobs that relied on tips. Many employers who wanted to hire the formerly enslaved also wanted to keep them at a low wage,” says USAToday.

By 1900 every state had passed anti-tipping laws, but by 1926 their governments repealed them or their supreme courts abolished them because they were unconstitutional and difficult to enforce as the practice spread widely, according to Time.

To this day, tipped workers are still not covered by the Federal Minimum Wage because tips are considered part of their hourly income.

Meanwhile, over the past 100 years, tipping has become ingrained in our culture for restaurant workers, cab drivers (and Uber drivers), hotel porters, valets, hair stylists, food-delivery drivers and so on.

I’ve always tipped generously to people in these roles.

But in the past few years, a lot of other workers are demanding tips: the check-out person at the convenience store, airport kiosks, and now landlords, who want gratuities for making repairs in the apartment you rent, reports Business Insider.

I think there are three reasons tipping is out of control:

First, our new tipping culture has been enabled by digital-transaction systems in which a tip window displays automatically as you pay for a good or service. Unlike the voluntary tip jars they replaced, digital systems make many people feel that a tip of some kind is mandatory.

Second, it’s been enabled by inflation as some business owners are eager for the rest of us to boost their employees’ pay, so they can attract good workers without having to jack up prices.

Third, it was enabled by the covid pandemic — the regrettable “gift” that keeps on giving — when we happily tipped workers of every kind just for showing up for work.

Yes, the new tipping culture is not so easy to navigate. Personally, I still tip workers in traditional tipping-related jobs generously.

But as a landlord, there’s no way on earth I’d expect a tenant to give me a gratuity for repairing a device that I am contractually required to repair.

But I’ll happily accept one if they’re crazy enough to give it to me!

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

I love pumpkin pie.

It reminds me of so many happy family gatherings when, after clearing the Thanksgiving table, we’d enjoy pumpkin pie, coffee and deeply satisfying conversation well into the evening.

My mother’s pumpkin pie has a thick, fluffy crust. She bakes her pies “well done” with a slight char on the top, giving them a unique and delicious oaky flavor.

Lucky for me, I’ve enjoyed her unique pumpkin pie experience for many years and will do so again this Thursday.

But after recently learning about the remarkable history of pumpkin pie, I love it more than ever.

According to History.com, pumpkin is a fruit that dates back 10,000 years ago to Central America, where indigenous people boiled and baked it in many forms.

After the “New World” was discovered, European explorers brought pumpkin seeds back home and cultivated them.

Pumpkin soon became part of “England’s highly developed pie-making culture, which had for centuries been producing complex stuffed pastries in sweet and savory varieties,” says History.com.

When the Pilgrims arrived in America in 1620, they brought their familiarity with pumpkins with them.

In fact, says History.com, “A year later, when the 50 surviving colonists were joined by a group of 90 Wampanoag for a three-day harvest celebration, it’s likely that pumpkin was on the table in some form.”

Without ovens, though, the Pilgrims initially had no way to make pumpkin pie.

As the Pilgrims flourished in New England, they preferred “apples, pears, and quince tarts instead of their former Pumpkin Pies,” wrote Massachusetts ship captain Edward Johnson in 1654.

This was probably because the process of turning pumpkin into a pie filling was time-consuming and laborious. It was much easier and faster to make a fruit pie.

Perhaps that’s the chief reason pumpkin pie didn’t catch on in America until 1796 with the publication of America’s very first cookbook, “American Cookery,” written by New England writer Amelia Simmons.

Simmons’ pumpkin pie recipe was unlike any that came before it. She used eggs, sugar and cream to create a filling more like custard or pudding — the delicious filling we enjoy now.

However, it would be years before Simmons’ version of pumpkin pie gained popularity beyond the New England region.

That changed in the 1800s as the pumpkin became a symbol of the anti-slavery movement in New England.

“Because pumpkins were a crop that grew easily and required very little labor for cultivation and harvest, pumpkin farming operated as the antithesis of the plantation economies of the South where cash crops like cotton, sugar, and tobacco were being mass-produced through exploitative slave labor,” reports YahooNews.

After President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, writers, such as Sarah Josepha Hale, published numerous recipes for turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, which soon became the staples of our iconic Thanksgiving feast.

In 1929 Libby’s introduced canned pumpkin-pie filling, which eliminated the labor-intensive process of turning pumpkin into custard — making it easy for everyone to enjoy pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving.

It took 10,000 years for the pumpkin fruit of Central America to make it to England, travel back to America and become a Thanksgiving staple, but if you ever had a bite of my mother’s incredible pumpkin pie, you’d know the wait was worth it.

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

Well, that didn’t take as long as expected.

In case you missed it, our federal government is now estimated to pay more than $1 trillion a year to service just the interest on our national debt — about $200 billion more than we spend on our military or Medicare.

Why are we suddenly paying so much?

Because the cost to service our debt has doubled in the past 19 months as annual federal deficits balloon and high interest rates make borrowing more expensive.

The origin of this “sudden” problem dates back to the early months of the covid pandemic when government lockdowns devastated the economy.

Initially, there was broad bipartisan support to borrow and spend huge amounts of federal money to stimulate the economy — forgoing any concerns that it might harm the economy over the long term.

In 2020 President Trump signed off on about $3 trillion in covid relief spending and a year later President Biden signed on for a few trillion more.

No small number of critics, including former Democratic Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, reported the New York Times, suggested that enough was enough and that the Biden boost would overheat the economy.

Other financial experts told us not to worry about higher inflation coming to get us all or said if it did come it would be temporary — “transitory” was the word they liked to use.

But that optimistic prediction didn’t work out so well.

Although the Federal Reserve’s goal is to keep inflation at about 2% each year, inflation shot up to 7% in 2021, 6.5% in 2022 and about 3.7% this year, according to the U.S. Inflation Calculator.

To accomplish lower inflation rates, the Fed had to raise interest rates 11 times in the last few years — which has caused a serious pain in the wallet for everyone who needs a mortgage or a new car.

In 2020 the average home buyer could get a 3% mortgage. Now the average 30-year-fixed rate runs about 8%. That means the cost to finance a $300,000 house with a 30-year term increased about $1,000 per month.

The same pain has extended to our federal budget.

A few years ago, the cost to service the federal debt was “only” about $400 billion for the year, but growing interest rates — and higher yields on government bonds to get people to buy our debt — have suddenly doubled our debt-service costs.

What’s worse is that as the people in charge in Washington continue to spend loosely and borrow recklessly, interest rates will get even worse.

According to the USDebtClock.org, the federal debt is fast approaching $34 trillion.

USDebtClock says we’ve spent about $6.2 trillion the past year, with government receipts at about $4 trillion. That means we need to borrow about $2 trillion to make up the difference.

And remember that half of that shortfall is just the cost of servicing current debt.

It’s no wonder that the last of the big three credit rating agencies, Moody’s, is warning it may yank the AAA rating it has given the U.S. since 1917 — just as Standard and Poor’s did in 2011 and Fitch did last year.

As CNN reports, a downgrade by Moody’s — caused by our representatives’ chronic inability to work out a realistic and sustainable federal spending path — will drive our borrowing costs all the higher.

I’m no financial expert, but if we don’t unite as a country and clean up our fiscal mess, spending $1 trillion-plus for debt service will soon be considered a bargain.

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

Finally, the press is doing some hard-hitting reporting about our upcoming presidential election.

Some in the media are alleging that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wears lifts in his boots. Naturally, this “scandal” has taken on the name “Bootgate.”

Why does DeSantis’ height matter? Because throughout American history the taller presidential candidates generally defeat their shorter competitors.

LiveScience explains that the reason we vote for taller political leaders goes back to our caveman days, when height suggested a person was stronger and more capable of protecting us than were shorter people.

Though the tallest candidate generally wins, it isn’t always the case.

George W. Bush was two or three inches shorter than Al Gore and Jimmy Carter, one of our shorter presidents at 5 feet 9½ inches, was almost three inches shorter than Gerald Ford.

DeSantis is 5 feet 11 inches, about the average height of U.S. presidents. In 2019 Biden’s doctor measured him at 5 feet 11.65 inches.

The immediate challenge for DeSantis is that his presidential primary opponent Donald Trump is 6 feet 3 inches — and about 45 points ahead in the polls.

When Trump’s people noticed that DeSantis prefers to wear cowboy boots, they began joking about his height, suggesting he wore thick-heeled boots because he was insecure about his height.

Then a TikTok creator created a sketch of DeSantis’s boots, which appeared to show that DeSantis is wearing special boots to make him look taller. The nine-second video went viral.

That led to Politico — who says its mission is to give us “access to reliable information” and “nonpartisan journalism” — interviewing three boot experts who provided detailed analysis to prove that DeSantis is indeed wearing boots with lifts.

By this point the story about DeSantis’ boots had become great fodder for late night comics.

Jimmy Fallon said that the reason DeSantis hates Disney is that they won’t let him ride anything.

That’s a pretty good joke — but not as silly as our news media has become.

According to Gallup’s annual Trust in Media survey, Americans’ confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately is at its lowest point since 2016, when Republicans’ trust plummeted.

In addition, in June Gallup found confidence readings in both TV news and newspapers that were near their historical lows and last December it found a record-low-tying rating of the honesty and ethics of journalists.

A majority of Republicans have long believed that the press is biased toward Democrat Party candidates. Today about 11% of Republicans have any trust in the media.

Republicans are much more likely to believe that Bootgate wouldn’t have become such a big story if a Democrat candidate like Biden or Obama was caught wearing lifts.

But here’s an interesting trend: Though a majority of Democrats still trust the media, about 58%, a growing number of Democrats are beginning to have their doubts. Last year, 70% of Democrats said they trusted the media.

No matter how you look at it, the news media’s numbers are not very good.

Goodness knows we need a robust press to uncover the truth about the people running for political office — a press that, for example, is as effective at holding politicians to account for their tax-and-spend policies as they are at investigating whether DeSantis has lifts in his boots.

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

Hopefully, the rugged beard I’ve been sporting will motivate at least one of my fellow men to take better care of his health this November.

Every November, you see, two charitable organizations, Movember and No-Shave November, raise funds by encouraging men to not cut or shave their facial hair.

Both organizations have made November an enjoyable month for we men to share photos of our thickening mustaches, beards and other long hair.

The idea is to get men thinking and talking about mental health, suicide prevention, prostate, testicular and colon cancer, and other illnesses affecting men.

According to a December 2022 report by the CDC men live, on average, about six years fewer than women.

There are a number of reasons why, explains HuffPost, and they don’t include any men jokes.

For starters, several studies show men are less likely to talk about their health and more likely to deny anything is wrong.

Avigail Lev, a licensed clinical psychologist in California, explained to HuffPost that because men are conditioned by society to deeply repress and suppress their emotions, they avoid seeking support for health issues when they need it.

Too often, we put off colonoscopies and prostate tests — limiting our doctors’ ability to detect and correct cancer in its earliest stages.

We ignore symptoms, pretending to ourselves nothing is wrong — giving whatever it is free reign to get worse until something really is wrong.

We think it isn’t masculine to engage a counselor when we are suffering a bout of depression — which is one reason why 60 men die from suicide around the world every hour of every day.

Too often, men self-medicate their medical problems or worries away through destructive social behaviors, such as smoking, drinking alcohol or using drugs — habits which are sure to destroy good health.

Add to this that men are much more likely to make poor dietary choices — for example, fast food that is loaded with artery-clogging fats — and it becomes clear why male health is so much worse than it needs to be.

But we can and must do better on the men’s health front — and every other front.

Men and boys are struggling in our country like never before.

It’s wonderful that so many of our girls are flourishing in school and the workforce, but our boys are falling behind at alarming rates.

New York Times columnist David Brooks cites the statistics:

“By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by GPA, are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys.”

Brooks notes that men are especially struggling in the workforce — if they’re working at all: One in three males with only a high school diploma — 10 million men — is now out of the labor force.

Men are increasingly isolated with far fewer friends than women, according to an American Perspectives Survey, leaving them with much less support to navigate the growing life and health challenges they face.

The great hope for all good people is for all of us to flourish regardless of our age or sex.

We all hope that our dads, uncles, brothers and sons become the healthiest, most productive people they can be.

Maybe seeing a face with a new mustache or beard this November will spark the robust discussion we need to help men improve their health and realize their full potential as flourishing human beings.

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

Halloween is upon us, which means you’d better be cautious about the costume you choose.

Halloween has long been a staple of childhood, but in the past few decades it has been increasingly celebrated by adults — and for good reason.

Until recently, it was the one day where adults could dress up in funny, outrageous costumes that satirized popular culture and the complexity of modern life.

Dressing up as a rock star, Albert Einstein, a famous sports figure or some other pop icon could be fun and funny.

There should be some limits to our costumes, of course.

Any costume displaying blackface is certainly out, which is obvious to everyone, with the exception of some fools who one day aspire to run for political office.

Any costumes that appropriate or mock different cultures — dressing up as a Native American, such as Pocahontas — are no longer considered fun.

But, according to Good Housekeeping, Bustle, The Independent and others, any attempt to satirize or mock covid-19, one of the biggest events in the past 100 years, is also off limits.

The Independent explains why: “The coronavirus pandemic killed millions of people, and continues to seriously affect those who are unvaccinated. Any costume that resembles the SARS-CoV-2 virus, anti-vaxxers, or someone with covid-19 are to be avoided.”

I get the point, but I don’t fully agree.

Look, satire is a powerful way to ridicule, in a humorous manner, who and what are wrong and ugly or hateful in our society.

A biting, satirical joke — or a wacky Halloween costume — can cut to the heart of the matter better than a direct criticism of a government policy.

Satire is the centerpiece of a healthy and truly free society, but it is now considered unfashionable by entities that are more worried about offending someone than they are about encouraging our freedom to think, question, speak and express ourselves honestly and openly.

In other words, it’s now in bad taste in America to not do exactly what the government tells you to do or to question overzealous government health policies, such as lockdowns and mandates.

Sorry, but where covid is concerned, I think some “bad taste” — or gallows humor — is warranted.

Merriam-Webster defines gallows humor as “humor that makes fun of a life-threatening, disastrous or terrifying situation.”

That is, it diffuses our tension and fear in our very worst moments and mocks death, evil and suffering — giving us the strength to fight on.

Comedian Joan Rivers once said about tragedies she suffered, “If you can laugh at it, you can deal with it.”

But in today’s bi-polarized society, regrettably, half of us believe in freedom of thought, speech and expression — and the benefit of satirical Halloween costumes that may sometimes offend.

The other half are so terrified that something we say or do may slight someone, we are fearful of poking fun or even chuckling at anything amusing.

I can understand the desire to avoid a Halloween costume that might offend your boss and cost you your job.

But I’m afraid our once raucous and robust American sense of humor is slowly dying.

To me, there are few things scarier than that this Halloween.

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

Autumn is upon us, but it is making me a little bit sad this year.

I have always loved autumn.

I love the brilliant colors, the chilly air and the smell of oak burning in a fire pit.

Whereas spring is about new life and fresh starts — and summer about toil and sweat and a one-week break at the beach — autumn is about harvesting your hard-earned fruits.

It’s about peacefully accepting that the warm weather will be gone soon — that the bitter cold winds and snow will soon be here.

Autumn used to be about sitting around a fire with good friends, sipping hot apple-cider toddies and laughing into the wee hours – and taking a much-needed respite from politics.

But this autumn it’s impossible to escape politics. It’s also impossible to avoid worrying about the state our country is in.

Just a few years short ago the economy was booming. The cost of food and utilities was low relative to our incomes, which were strong and growing. The world was relatively stable and peaceful and prosperity was improving for billions across the globe.

Now we have major wars in Ukraine and Israel and the cost of goods and services have soared and continue to inflate.

According to the U.S. debt clock, our national debt stands at nearly $34 trillion — about $100,000 for every person in the country — and it continues to soar at a rapid pace. How long can such spending go on?

Crime rates are up across the board.

According to Newsweek, crime is increasing everywhere, not only in big cities. With organized looting by gangs out of control and going largely unpunished, many big retailers are closing stores.

And with so many people entering our country through our open borders — including those coming here with the sole purpose of attacking us — how long will it be before the next major terrorist event happens?

This past weekend I had some friends over to my house to enjoy the autumn splendor, but our firepit party got rained out, so we stayed inside.

Normally, such autumn gatherings are filled with joy and laughter, but this year we all shared a sense of worry for our country — and the world our children and grandchildren are going to inherit.

We all expressed a sense that our world has gone mad — that nobody is in control — and we are all feeling anxious as we wait for the other shoe to drop.

Of the many autumn events I have hosted, I cannot remember any of them being filled with such fear and concern.

But that is what is on our minds at the moment — and what is on the minds of many people. The recent Associated Press-NORC Research Center poll finds that 78% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

I’ve always believed you should never bet against America, but our political leaders had better start making better decisions than they have been making.

That means things like limiting government overreach and spending, responding decisively to fight crime and choosing effective and wise leaders who will bring stability to the country and the world.

Unfortunately, at the moment it appears that our only choice for future leader of the free world next year will be between one fellow who will be 81 and one fellow who is almost that age.

But I still have hope that we will get our act together so I can get back to hosting fun and happy autumn gatherings into the wee hours.

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].

When I read a news piece about the passing of longtime California senator Dianne Feinstein a few weeks ago, some of the comments left at the bottom of the online article made me sad.

Feinstein suffered a very public health decline before she passed.

Anyone with the slightest sense of empathy would think “there but for the grace of God go I” — as every one of us could suffer a similar decline before our time finally comes.

Empathy is in short supply these days, however.

I don’t recall the exact words, but some commenters who disagreed with her political positions wrote comments such as “good riddance.” Others used derogatory terms that portrayed Feinstein not as a fellow human being but as some evil entity whose death was a good thing.

This past weekend, as Hamas gunmen from Gaza invaded Israel, killing and assaulting hundreds of civilians, my heart ached for people like Shani Louk, a 30-year-old woman who had been attending a dance music festival when she was kidnapped and paraded through the streets semi-naked in the back of a pickup truck.

My immediate response was incredible compassion for the pain and terror this poor woman suffered before she was killed — my heart breaks for her and her family.

The immediate response from many others around the world, however, was coldhearted and purely political — that her suffering was Israel’s fault because the country supposedly had this terrorist attack coming.

Not only do we live in a time in which everything is political all the time, we live in a world where people with whom we disagree are no longer seen as fellow human beings who have differing thoughts, but as evil entities that must be stopped by any means.

Why have our hearts become so much harder? One of the key reasons is the way we now receive and process information.

Dr. Helen Riess, author of “The Empathy Effect,” says empathy’s decline has to do with social media.

A Street Roots report on her book says “many of the neurological keys to feeling empathy are missing from the exchange” when we communicate through texts, email and social media posts.

When communicating electronically, not face to face, there’s no chance of paying attention to body language and facial expressions — or to make eye contact, which is a really important component of empathy.

Psychology Today cites research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that a simple lack of eye contact enables an anonymity that fosters rudeness and encourages online trolling.

Unfortunately, the magazine reports, the era of smartphones and social media — of nasty tweets and Facebook insults — is making rudeness “our new normal.”

Riess continues that without emotional cues that we can see, we’re left with only words (and images) on a screen, which leads to detachment and creates emotional indifference.

An increasing number of people treat those with whom they disagree this way — which contributes to the general decline of empathy in our civil discourse.

Though Riess says empathy is being blunted, she emphasizes to Forbes that it can be learned.

Her thinking is seconded by an interesting New York Times article that identifies specific actions we can all take to restore empathy in our own hearts.

The simple truth is that we need to stop hiding behind our electronic devices and actively engage with people face-to-face.

We need to set politics aside now and then to embrace our common humanity — and relearn how to sympathize with suffering when humans are at their worst.

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Copyright 2023 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Purcell, creator of the infotainment site ThurbersTail.com, which features pet advice he’s learning from his beloved Labrador, Thurber, is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Email him at [email protected].