I think it’s pretty obvious to say that American society is at a breaking point. People will argue that, saying that it’s Fake News and that things are fine and all that but these are also many of the people who are tuning out things that upset them or disrupt their vision of how the world is. People tune out because of ‘too much politics’ and ‘too much social justice’ and any number of reasons, preferring the cat videos and baby pictures they hold in quiet disdain instead of the political and social stuff which tends to bring out the worst in people.
We deserve our personal safe places. Our safe havens.
Life is hard enough without feeling under constant barrage, whatever your opinion and feeling on things. We deserve it…within reason. The problem is that reason isn’t in use much these days. We are isolating ourselves, picking hills to die on, and by god, if you cross some line that you have, well, then you’re a terrible person and are blocked and deleted on social media and ignored in real life. There is nothing common about decency any longer and the notion of civil disagreements seems lost. And I am no different. We’re at a point where the divisions seem bigger, the stakes higher, and for me, it’s hard to want to listen to someone make excuses about a world I see gone off the rails.
And that is me, just me.
Everyone is different.
Everyone has their own views and ways that the world works for them.
And I know full well that my outrage weighs no more, and no less, than anyone else’s. We live in a world where outrage is the default, leading to the great Tune Out.
But the problem here is that, in tuning out the Other, we’re tuning out the whole, not just the part, but the whole. There is a narrative being written about this nation, this gneration, and this world, and it’s being written by a very few people to represent the many. That’s always been how politics works, that’s not new, but it’s also never been more contentious or dangerous. Even the Civil War’s main effect was on America, today our policies and decisions shape the world. We’re in an era where it is easier for people to believe in nothing, than it is to buy into anything. An era where people can adamantly believe that the world is flat, despte evidence of the ages. We live in an era where it is easier to believe that the whole of the government is part of a conspiracy to lie, to obfuscate, and to kill us. It seems laughable, heck, it is, that people’d rather believe not even the worst but the utter worst, but you an see why things got that way. You can see why people would take the lies that are told, that are bought and are sold, and we are living in a time now where the lies of the President seem acceptable to many, so long as he holds the Them at bay, whomever they are for someone.
Every day brings a new twist to a nation that once prided itself as the leaders of the world. We have turned against all of history and have decided to wrap ourselves in our national flag and want to close the borders and do for us, with us, by us. Unfortunately the genie is out of that bottle and we can’t go back. We are part of a global community, something we used to take pride in, and all isolation will do is keep our allies away. The thing is that the enemy is within. The disgruntled, the broken, the lost, the angry, and the militant. We have created our own monsters and that isn’t slowing down.
There comes a time where you have to open your eyes to the fire that’s around you. A time when you either accept that you are being willfully ignorant or you take in a situation for what it is.
While truth is a flexible, malleable thing, there are things we cannot deny and right now, this national house is on fire and many of us are choosing to stay in the house. Social rights, personal liberties, and climate devastation should not be topics we are willing to fight as they seem to be part of what oure nation is founded on, for the first two, and what may be our undoing, on the second part.
Climate science denial is the new flat earth buy in. People refusing everything that seems to say that we are adversely effecting the world. I always look at that idea in this way – sit in a car for a few hours with a smoker and the glass will fog and be covered in a yellow film. Now imagine that you were in there for not just a couple of hours but many hours, days, months, years, and you are starting to get a vague notion of how we are damaging the ozone and planet. To think that humans are not having an effect on the world is nuts. Pure and simple. But again, the hills we choose to die on.
In the end, our outrage is our own.
Our upset, our rage, our disdain.
We can join it to others and to causes but you need just read between the lines of society and what is happening to see where we are going, and it’s not a good place .
It’s not a happy future.
The house is burning around us, and unless we decide to wake the heck up and get out, we are just aren’t going to make it out alive.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 