Nehaveigur

Last week, my wife and I packed our kids into the car and drove four hours to a cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Early November is a good time to spend be there if it doesn’t rain. It didn’t, and on one of our walks we even saw a mother bear and two cubs.

On the first evening, after the kids were in bed, I went to a nearby bar. The men were mostly wearing baseball caps, but I also saw a cowboy hat, hunting camo and a few younger men with mullets. I started talking with one of them who, apart from his mullet, also had a small moustache and buck teeth. He told me about some of his hunting adventures in the mountains, where he had lived most of his life. We ended up talking for almost two hours, with the topics ranging from deer hunting to the near-eradication of the bison in the American West, the population density of the Sierra Nevada compared to the Alps, how to cook hare and pheasant, and the diet of wild pigs. Apparently, they’re cannibalistic.

With the presidential election only a few days away, this wasn’t the conversation I thought I’d have on my way to the bar. We didn’t talk politics at all, and I’m glad we didn’t. Trump becoming president again would have significant downside risk that’s not balanced by the potential upsides. I also feel that talking about this incessantly, or even worse, watching others talk about it on TV or on social media, doesn’t change this. There’s informed and then there’s obsessed, and many of the people I know are in the latter category. Politics has taken over so much of our collective attention that there’s not enough left for what’s important.