As goodness keeps beckoning to me, negative news about troubling current events keeps getting to me… as I mentioned, in the Daily Post… just shortly after mentioning, in a previous article, that I’d been adding ‘goddammit’ to my spoken and written words.
I could mention a slew of news, just over the past several days, that you might agree might justify my oral and written utterances of ‘goddammit,’ even as goodness is wooing me.
There was an AP News headline, for instance… “Oklahoma county worried about fallout from [a] racist recording.”
According to the news agency, “So many residents of northern Texas cross the border into McCurtain County in far southeast Oklahoma each week that the area has earned the nickname: ‘Dallas-Fort Worth Hamptons.’
“With its clean rivers and lakes, these forested foothills of the Ouchita Mountains have become dotted with luxury cabins, and a tourism boom over the last two decades has fueled a renaissance in the region… parents are more optimistic that their children won’t have to leave the community to find work.
“But the growing optimism about the county’s future took a gut punch… when the local newspaper identified several county officials…who were caught on tape discussing killing journalists and lynching Black people.
“Just hearing it on audio and coming from our elected officials’ mouths in a meeting, it made my stomach turn,” a longtime county resident said.
One commissioner had resigned, and there were calls “for others to step down.”
Meanwhile, Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert was making headlines. Newsweek reported she had slammed “Democrats and climate-change activists, saying on Twitter that they use Earth Day – a holiday aimed at gathering support for environmental protections — to cause a wedge in society,” and she went on to say… “On this Earth Day, let’s always remember to appreciate this incredible world God has given us… Liberals will try to make this day about climate change to divide us…”
Imagining how God might interpret her tweeted views on climate change, and liberals, might be amusing.
What if ‘goddammit’ were to become a metric, an amusing, super cool one — unlike what might be considered standard, sometimes relatively boring, business metrics.
Adding a word like ‘factor,’ might be necessary, calling it the ‘Goddammit Factor,’ or ‘Gdammit Factor, for short, so it will seem weightier. It could be applied in such situations as the unfortunate one in the southeast Oklahoma county, and the one involving Colorado’s 3rd district congressional representative.
The number of goddammits calculated, in each case, then might help analysts assess public opinion of folks in the public eye, as it relates to the news engulfing them.
Hypothetically, many hundreds or thousands of ‘goddammits’ tabulated for Oklahoma county officials, or Rep. Boebert, could be a key metric in the Gdammit Factor.
Have you heard about host Tucker Carlson leaving Fox News? Or Texas Senator Ted Cruz getting “ridiculed for saying smoking is a person’s ‘own damn choice’ while celebrating abortion restrictions,” in Business Insider?
Just imagine all the goddammits possibly factoring into their respective Gdammit Factor stats! So when someone’s wondering where Mr. Carlson might reemerge, in the media business, or what the Texas senator’s future might entail, statisticians could simply pull up their Gdammit metrics, and weigh in… with weighty statistics.
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.