I watched the Kentucky Derby this year on Sunday, May 2. I try my best to watch the race, as there is something about it that I truly love. Growing up, we never missed seeing the race, at least not if we could help it. My mom loved the Kentucky Derby for reasons unknown. I guess that gene got passed down to me.
This past Derby was one of the best I’d ever seen. I fell in love with Medina Spirit, so happy for this little horse that thought it could. He wasn’t favored to win. In fact, he wasn’t favored to do much more than get out of the gate.
I’ve never had anything against Bob Baffert either. In fact, the first Kentucky Derby I saw in person, sitting up in those glorious stands, with my little set of binoculars, like all the proper ladies, I watched one of Baffert’s horses win that year. It was astonishing to be in the electricity of that crowd, watching those horses race.
Now, Baffert and Medina Spirit have been in the news for doping. He’s claiming Medina has dermatitis, and there were some steroids in the cream for the skin flair up. Fair enough. So far, they haven’t stripped him of the title, and he’s allowed to race at the upcoming Preakness.
If he did dope the horse, it is just another reminder that hacking is everywhere. He hacked the horse, the race, and the spirit, right out of the race. Literally.
Of course, now we have a much more serious hack on our hands — the fuel pipeline for the entire southeastern portion of our nation. I have long said the next world war will not be started by bombs but by widespread hacks of power grids, pipelines, communications, internet. Things will go very dark before the skies light up.
This attack was so targeted that we should recover very soon. That is, if people don’t freak out. But as usual, when a few flakes of snowfall on the ground, the bread shelves go empty. Such is the case with the gasoline stations in the southern states. There are lines, miles long, for gasoline. People are starting to hoard the stuff. We are a country that runs on fear.
I shouldn’t close the door entirely on hacking. There are good hacks too.
A whole industry has been created around life hacks. Kitchen hacks. Shopping hacks. And more. Things like: “Make the perfect hard-boiled eggs in the oven.”
I hate to break the news to them, but those are no longer hard-boiled eggs. They are baked eggs.
The truth is, I am too much of a believer in the phrase, “If it sounds too good to be true, it might be too good to be true.”
Those life hacks never quite work out for me the way they show up in the videos. I think I’m fully immune to life hacks.
As for all the others, pipelines, computers, Derby horses? Let us pray for our sins. In so many of these cases, we have been set up to fail. It is only a matter of time until someone nefarious will see that we do fail.
All of this aside, there is one hack that I love. That is the hack of Bill the Cat from Bloom County. He, Opus, and all the others have a way of reminding us of so many good lessons about life.
And there are good lessons about life.
The best one, perhaps, is that we are all born with love in our hearts and purity in our souls. We are fresh little spiritual beings, just waiting to behold our new surroundings.
We should always remember that moment and sit in quiet with ourselves, revisiting that time when we were pure love. And when we open our eyes, we might see the world in a brand new way.
And that might be our greatest hack of all.
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“And it is you, spirit–with will and energy, and virtue and purity–that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
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“The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.”
― Saul Bellow
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“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”
― Mae West
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Hacking. All over the place.
