Whatever happened to the concept of curiosity? I grew up curious. No, I wasn't preoccupied by "conspiracy theories" or just challenging authority. I was just naturally interested in things I didn't understand. As a young kid that was pretty much everything. In fact, since I didn't understand most complex systems, I ended up turning the other cheek. I found the sheer number of challenges overwhelming, so I gradually gave up inquiries all together. I turned my interests to simpler systems, like playing baseball. I began to love skiing, or body surfing. Learning how to have fun was much more rewarding and required little or no intellectual focus. I see a similar circumstance happening across our entire cultural horizon. The greater population seems to have given up on anything that requires intellectual engagement. Every social system, or generational challenge to the order of our cultural arrangements, our civilization, is getting lost in the stimulation we receive from entertainment, electronic devices or drugs. Let me give you some examples of what I am referring to: we have a serious problem with gender dysphoria. The incidence of gender confusion, rejection and self destruction is increasing at alarming rates. The result is disruption in schools, in the workplace and among families. The symptoms are increased sexual disease, self destructive behaviors, social anxiety, isolation and violence directed at children. Families are disintegrating. The idea of a traditional nuclear family is denigrated in academia, and increasingly across the medical profession. Our schools are handing out pamphlets that illustrate pornographic activities and what some would describe as deviant sexual practices. Men are being marginalized while society promotes feminist constructs of female empowerment. All of this promotes alternative family arrangements that mimic gang hierarchies. The incidence of warfare (which can take on unfamiliar forms) is increasing, not decreasing. In a modern, well educated, well fed civil culture, war should be occurring less frequently. But the opposite is true: we have wars on poverty, on racism, on genderism, on religion, on marriage, on wealth, on property rights, on civil rights, on parental rights, on immigration, and on abortion. On every continent, in every culture and across every age bracket, people are fighting with each other over anything and everything. Not every war produces death, but they all have consequences and victims. Violence has also taken on new dimensions. Some is traditional destruction of lives and property, but much of it now manifests itself in psychological damage, or cultural chaos. Children suffer in silence from sexual assaults or from abandonment. As they grow their damaged minds find it hard to assimilate and they act out with antisocial activities, sometimes warning us with written manifestos of violence and mayhem. The media inflicts enormous amounts of psychological damage through unrelenting streams of fear porn: constantly hammering us with visual displays of human misery. The "Climate Crisis" is the perfect platform for imposing fear across all demographic populations. It is the Malevolent God we all all fear the most because it reaches everyone no matter their social status. And it can strike in so many indefensible ways: violent natural storms, floods, earthquakes and fires. It becomes indistinguishable from manmade catastrophes, and politicians can blame all of their failures on natural disasters. In recent years we have experienced hundreds of abhorrent disasters; in 2001 we watched airliners filled with aviation fuel destroy enigmatic towers and thousands of lives. We witnessed survivors leap hundreds of stories to their deaths to avoid incineration. In Oklahoma innocents were blown to bits with homemade fertilizer bombs. Mad manTed Kaczynski used ingenious packaged bombs to terrorize the country for 17 years. We have seen thousands of children slaughtered with guns or torched in fires set by their own parents. Many of the worst public displays of terror were televised: Islamic radicals beheading kidnap victims (mostly Jewish). The 911 World Trade Center collapse. The kidnapping of the Israeli Olympic athletes and the murder of the French Charlie Hedbo magazine employees. The Branch Davidian Waco Texas disaster in 1993, and don't forget the Boston Marathon bombing and ensuing manhunt. These are just a few of the hundreds of violent mass murders in the past century we all shared on TV. Others occurred so fast that cameras weren't quick enough to record the carnage:, the University of Texas belltower massacre in 1966, the Beltway Sniper Attacks in 2002, the mass murder at McDonalds in San Diego, and others that were partially recorded like the school shooting in Nashville Tennessee, where the body cam recorded the death of the shooter. Then there are the mystery mass murders that are left unexplained: the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Resort concert shooting that has never been properly reported. The mathematical impossibility that one shooter could exact so much damage with no apparent help or motive. It remains the worst mass shooting in American history and no one can explain why, or how exactly, it happened. Then there is the Maui Fire of August 2023. So much of it is still inexplicable, including the fact that so many "Blue" items in the path of the wildfire remained untouched. That some buildings burned from the inside out, and that many witnesses reported bright columns of intense energy raining down from the sky and exploding with enormous power across the island. There are simply too many of these powerful examples of horrendous events that after only a few months in the headlines seem to fade into oblivion. People are too jaded to care any more. It is just TMI to absorb and the emotional toll is just too high to worry about. So what do we "citizens" do? How can we get control over our own destiny? Or is that just a figment of our imagination? Maybe it is just inevitable that we should turn our attention to making ourselves happy. Fill our time with frivolous entertainment and self indulgent relationships with friends and food. I think the evidence is clear, that is what people in the 21st century are getting extremely good at. Move along, there is nothing here for you to be bothered about. |
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