Sunday, December 24, 2017

I've been mulling over attempting to write some kind of definitive piece regarding the Trump era, and how I fear it represents a serious danger to our way of life as it slings daggers at the very heart of our society.

I must admit, I find it absolutely overwhelming. I honestly don't know where to start, or what direction to take it. I'm not even sure how to define how I feel, or what I think of all of it. I feel I am a fairly adept writer, but I don't believe I have command of the thoughts or the words to communicate anything even reasonably intelligible. It's just too deep, too vast.

I guess I should take things a piece or two at a time, and perhaps later find a means to bind them all together to form a comprehensive overview of where I believe we find ourselves.

I truly fear we are in new and dangerous territory. We didn't get to this perilous juncture overnight. It's been brewing for several decades, at least since the 1950s with the advent of the civil rights movement. We are living in what has become a deep ideological rift - a yin and yang that has not yet found a way to integrate, one with the other. It's difficult to even communicate with each other because we start from so vastly different paradigms. We barely speak the same language, and have certainly developed vastly different philosophies.

The fact that change comes so rapidly and from all directions makes our plight even harder to define. Throughout much of human history radical change in the way people lived often took centuries. There do remain people living today who do so much as their ancestors did hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago.

But most of us have been living through changes starting, I suppose, with the western renaissance, and then subsequently accelerating with the advent of the industrial revolution. But even those changes came slowly compared to what has been happening to most of us just over the past 50 years or so, what with the coming of the computer age which has enabled the acquisition of and access to heretofore unimaginable amounts of information, and the ability to communicate much of that information instantly with people all round the world and beyond. We simply don't know what to do with all of it, or what it means to us in the present, how it will affect our future, and how it has enabled us to see into the past. So much of what we long believed to be true about human history has been at least called into question, and much of it has been debunked.

Many of us are effectively dazzled by what we see, hear and feel in this electronic age, finding it confusing and frightening. So, some find comfort in "clinging to their guns and their bibles," harkening back to some time before, some vague "good old days" when men were men or some shit. Others, of a more opportunistic ilk exploit our confusion and fear as a means to kindle falsehoods into conspiracies for their own aggrandizement, ascending to power and often great financial gain.

Fortunately, others of us manage to calm ourselves, dampen our fears and attempt to look through or around, all the clamor, all the sturm und drang, all the misinformation, all the hysteria and ignorance in an effort to grab onto a trailing thread that will hopefully take us to a place of reason and understanding.

The race is on.