"We can't stop here. This is bat country!"

 "The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. "What's wrong?" I yelled. "We can't stop here. This is bat country!""

Excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Rolling Stone, November 11, 1971.

80 years ago today, July 18, 1937, the world gave us a unique gift in the form of Hunter S. Thompson.  From humble beginnings, he became the new voice of...something.  What that something is, or was, has yet to be determined.

If nothing else, he was a spokesman for the weird, a demographic which really didn't have a spokesman, at least not one with his profile. Over time, he would become an acerbic critic of the establishment.  

Today, his standing is often overlooked.  However, I would argue, his perspective has never been more prescient.  Today, we live in a world more distorted from previous realities than any other time.

Thompson held the contemporary political administrations in the highest of disgust.  Nixon, in particular, was the recipient of great wrath.  But, I would like to go back to this singular quotation and bring it to the present day.

My claim is, simply, that we can't stop here.  This IS bat country.  We are in a place never before experienced, it is weird, it is dangerous, and we can't stop here.

Regardless of your political orientation, whatever your history or status, we, as a nation and a culture, are in a place we have never been before.  HST always argued that the bats were swooping down upon us, forward motion was imperative simply for survival, otherwise, we would be assaulted, sucked dry by these sky rats.

I'm not veering from his premise by much.  I am trying to state my case to those who may fall anywhere on the political spectrum.  Tho I may succumb  to partisan bs at points, my main objective is to show just how off kilter we have become as a culture; how divisive, peevish, hair-triggered we as a nation have become.  

This cannot end well.  As everyone has their hand on a didactic weapon, ready to fire off a retaliatory round to put the next guy in their place, no matter how insignificant the point, how are we, as a nation, a culture, to make progress?

So many things absolutely boggle my mind today.  The vast majority are not political, but social.  For instance, how does the younger generation find their way to shared, social media based music?  Whatever happened to the good old mix tape?  Is owning music no longer a thing?

Full contact football is questioned as an existential risk to our youth, yet cops get away with murder.  

These are the kind of issues I want to address.  How did we get here?  Where, exactly, are we?  

It would seem we are truly in bat country.  Undefined menaces, possibly totally imagined, possibly very real, are swooping and diving our heads. And, we cannot stop here, we must, as a nation and a culture, keep moving. To survive, we must move beyond our current quagmire.  Otherwise, the nuisance will become a menace, and the menace an incontrovertible barrier to solutions.

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