“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

I get irritated at a lot of things that are abstract—society and culture, the limitations of physics, and so on.

But it takes a whole hell of a lot to really, really irritate me on a person-to-person level—to get me irritated at somebody in particular. I’m a person with lots of feelings, but usually irritation is near the bottom of the list.

Right now, however, I am seriously personally irritated. I am trying to talk myself down, but frankly, there are few harder feelings to talk yourself down from.

What nonsense times we live in, full of nonsense easy answers. Somehow everyone simply thinks, “Gosh, generations before me must have been stupid. Life is so easy! A couple of buzzwords and some inspiring quotes!”

Nonsense. There will be many reckonings for a generation. And then the pendulum will swing, full speed, in the other direction once again. It has already begun to do so, as evidenced by recent mass movements in politics.

The current crop of 30-somethings has been the ’70s “me generation” all over again. The return of Reagan’s revolution is next, with a resurgence of traditional values. Generation Y is already showing signs. Another generation down the road and it will be here.