Living in interesting times.

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

The chill air arrived about on time for the change of season.

With COVID-19 plaguing our lives, we seem to have lost track of these spiritual moments that serve as markers in our lives.

The political outweighing the reality of life itself.

We get spun like threads of silk into shapes we do not recognize as real – some master puppeteer pulling each string so that we react.

We have media-created disasters, wildfires that spread across the landscape of our lives and influence who we will be today and for what purpose.

Media always looks for some magic moment to exploit, new 9/11 or a George Floyd moment that changes our perceptions and steers us into some new course we never expected.

We seek gratification from our news media the way ancients sought from tribal seers, information being the new religion, and media guiding us the way priests did towards some level of salvation, one event tells us to stick little patriotic flags on our car antennas, the next telling us to kneel during the national anthem, neither reality meaning anything except to create our need to conform.

We need to fit it, to seem to go along with the crowd, to hate racism and to love the environment, even though both have become fronts for unscrupulous profiteers, mask wearing that has nothing to do with any virus except for greed.

We are so busy reacting to the latest scandal we forget that life is meant for living, and not living in fear.

We get a scandal every day now, some desperate media trick to create a new pandemic of fear, so that we remain shaken and uncertain, and we forget to notice the drop in the temperature outside is a sign of a change of season, not climate change.

We are being taught that all black people have to be fearful of cops, and all white people have to feel guilty about what some of our ancestors did when they didn’t know any better, and that progress towards accepting people of color as equals means nothing because we will always be accused for being racist as long as our faces remain white.

We are supposed to notice the wildfires burning up the west coast, but not the wildfires out of control radicals have set loose in our cities. We’re supposed to mourn the death of rapists and convicted felons at the hands of police, but not the murder of cops by radicals. We are supposed to condemn a 17-year-old white man for defending himself but not blame the man who raped his girlfriend and then brandished a knife before being shot by police.

If we notice the wind, we are supposed to fear it because it may carry some deadly virus rather than the sweet scent of this season’s decaying flowers, but the stench we catch a whiff of is not that of the distant burning forests in Oregon, but of the manipulation of events that insist we remain fearful and cause us to become the very thing we are being accused of being in the first place.

It’s hard not to become judgmental when media manipulates us so openly, and sells us snake oil instead of truth, and it’s hard to trust leaders who would destroy a person’s life over a haircut, or send people to die in nursing homes – all for some political gain that will eventually fade into some new manufactured myth in the future.

We live in interesting times, the Chinese say, and this is a curse.