AN ADULT REFLECTS IN A TIME WHEN JUVENILITY PREVAILS

AN ADULT REFLECTS IN A TIME WHEN JUVENILITY PREVAILS 


REFERENCE:

A voice of calm comes to me via e-mail with others of a similar reflection as well, but many who are caught up in the fever of the times. This, too, will pass as well the pandemic.

Good people with views differing with my own are passionate, and rightly so, about what they think, feel and believe. They are correspondents from Canada, across the United States, and from Europe.

The person who wrote what follows I have known for forty years, watched his career soar without ever losing his sense of humor or sense of proportion, and whom I’ve encouraged to turn to writing one day, as he writes so well.

BB and I love him and thank him for giving us another lesson in humanity.

JRF

OUR FRIEND WRITES:

I must applaud your courage to speak your mind plainly in a time where such is becoming increasingly radioactive.

Some thoughts:

We all have our opinions. We tend to forget that our opinions are subjective, and come to see them as ‘right’. Once there, then any differing opinions are ‘wrong’, and the fight’s on. Some of us can be extremely passionate in that pursuit.

None of us knows Trump. None of us knows Biden. In pure terms, we ‘know’ nothing; we have beliefs based upon what we’ve read, been told and observed. If one reads the gamut of news sources, one sees immediately that they’re all pitching blarney to differing market segments for profit.


We all tend to tune into the source that resonates with our own existing beliefs and experiences. We’re all getting different information based on which polluted pipe we drink from. I regularly see things in the press with which I’m personally involved. It is almost never right. A few of the facts may be true, but they’re spun together in a dishonest way to manipulate the resulting impression.

People are emotional, and thus the path to manipulate them is through their emotions, and you do that by selecting the information you share with them (the narrative). A politician – in government, the workplace, the PTA – is a person who betters himself via manipulating others. Thus, fraud is the essence of politics. I’ve personally known two honest men who tried politics; neither survived their first term in Congress.

I read the foreign press as well as domestic, and while things work similarly in other countries, nowhere has it been amplified to the feverish state that it is in the US. The personal vilification and subsequent destruction of anyone who disagrees or sees things in a differing view is a very bad trend. So too the double-speak wherein bad things are giving positive labels. (Mostly peaceful rioters). My sense is that our politics are "Distraction Theater," and while we’re all absorbed in the circus, few of us are noticing while the people who really run the world are looting it.

It will be interesting to see if Biden can control his own party, and how America reacts two years from now in the next Congressional election.

Provo to the end.