By RAHN ADAMS
SALEM, N.C. (Jan. 14, 2026) — Last week I got fed up with current events and fired off one of those “What a Crazy World We Live In” posts on social media. In it, I pointed out that on the one hand we’re raptly watching a reverent procession of orange-robed Buddhist monks and their well-behaved dog walk single file across the South promoting peace, while on the other hand we are terrified to witness legions of masked federal stormtroopers, like Hitler’s SS, descending upon Main Street, U.S.A., and murdering us in broad daylight. (Yes, it truly was murder — a conscious decision at worst, depraved indifference at best. However it occurred, the killing was anointed by our heads of state and blessed by the crowd that pushes for The Ten Commandments to be posted everywhere publicly, including “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” I presume.)
Talk about the yin and the yang of living in the material world now. It’s like night and day; like fire and ice; like having a white dog on one shoulder, a black dog on the other; or like claiming to be followers of Christ, but worshiping the devil instead, as many white Christian fundamentalists do. These days I can’t seem to get W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming” out of my head, with its talk about things falling apart and centers not holding and anarchy being loosed upon the world. (That’s where the “Rough Beast” in my headline comes from. It isn’t a reference to the monks’ yellow dog.)
Yeah, this is gonna be one of those blog columns — not a lot of laughs, because Rahn’s big-boy panties are in a wad again. (Well? Referring to oneself in the third person seems to be par for the course now, even though it was a funny bit from a 30-year-old Seinfeld episode.)
Oh, right. Rahn needs to buy himself some big-boy panties. Sorry, he gets those put-downs mixed up sometimes. It’s from having TDS or from letting that lying sack of farts with the orange spray-tan and weird comb-over live rent-free in his head. All the bald-faced lies, hatefulness, bullying and braggadocio run together after a while. (And that’s how SAD things have gotten — I mean, that the big bad wolf of 5th Avenue’s dyed-in-the-wool Sheep Are Du-u-u-ummmb.)
And then there’s the propaganda machine. We hear much about narco-terrorists, how they may look like poor South American fishermen plying the Caribbean Sea in small boats off the coast of Venezuela, but that they’re actually dangerous drug traffickers. Well, OK, but what about all the Epstein-adjacent pedo-traffickers and the super-billionaire klepto-terrorists who are running our government now and are destroying the American democracy we’ve known since 1791, when our Bill of Rights was ratified? (Hey, I can make up scary-sounding buzzwords, too, pal.)
Anywho, if I have to choose between honoring 19 quiet little men who have shaved their heads to show their monastic commitment and lack of vanity, and worshiping a preening, loudmouthed bully whose fake hair looks like he starts every day with a toilet swirly; between monks who are men of peace and a lumbering ape who sees himself in the role of Man o’ War but merely smells like a dirty stall; between orange robes and an orangutan who isn’t smart enough to be in a Clint Eastwood movie, I’ll pick the Venerable Monks any day. There is nothing venerable about this commander-in-chief and his F Troop of incompetent cabinet secretaries and Christofascist policy advisors. (And I didn’t have to make that word up.)
Even Aloka the Peace Dog, such a good boy, deserves the Nobel (or FIFA) Peace Prize more than does the Mar-a-Lago Mussolini, whose arrogant Blackshirts shot a young mother three times in the head last week during a traffic stop and then called her a “fucking bitch” as she bled out. (I didn’t make that up, either, sadly.)
That being said, I’ll keep this short. We’re hoping to catch a glimpse of the monks and Aloka this week on their Walk for Peace through North Carolina on their way to our nation’s capital. But if we aren’t able to see them in person, we’ll continue to walk with them in spirit (following their progress online and on social media).
My new benediction, my motto? Rise and resist, peaceably if possible. With words, courage and determination. Before it’s too late (and that may be sooner than you think).