Acronyms

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I’ve been thinking about the plethora of acronyms we all must keep track of these days to stay even remotely in touch with what’s going on in the world. For instance: The MAGA folks have enabled DOGE to fire NIH staff and medical researchers and are pressuring universities to cut DEI programs and suppress support for BLM protests. Enabled by congressional majorities MAGA has exacerbated natural disasters by cutting FEMA staff, has created ICE to arrest and deport BRCs, cut funding to PBS and NPR.

It’s all very difficult to follow. Because of my ADD leading to OCD and, I fear, PTSD, I’m finding it hard to decide on BLT’s or PB&J for lunch.

Orbital

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Samantha Harvey tells the story of a crew of astronauts circling the earth in an international space station. Each crew member contemplates his or her existence with a new awareness, removed as they are from the 24 hour cycle of life one experiences on the planet surface. Circling the globe as many as fourteen times in an earth day, accompanied by fourteen sunrises and as many sunsets, the astronauts watch, god-like, as a cyclone forms above the Philippines. They each come in time to the profound realization their very existence is extremely fragile, dependent upon the celestial body they’re circling.

As they perform their assigned experiments and daily maintenance tasks, over-coming the space sickness and lack of sound sleep, they nevertheless marvel at the constantly changing color and light show they see as they hurdle, weightless behind and around the entity that sustains they’re existences.

Such a perspective must surely overshadow the petty power struggles that define life on planet Earth.

Story Lines

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As people became more sedentary during the Neolithic era tribal groups united forming larger populations. These disparate groups, to form a functioning society needed to share a common sense of the way things are, a shared belief system. They needed a storyline that all could grasp, accept and believe in order to accept a hierarchical structure to deal with property ownership and exchange of goods.

A workable storyline would need to include reference to the supernatural. Human uncertainty requires connection to an entity that can be appealed to when crops fail, drought occurs, or outsiders threaten the groups existence.

As societal stability evolves, multiple story lines will develop, one flexible and open to new developments, another rigid, protective and resistant to change. Hopefully stable institutions will be in place at that point to accommodate such diversity of thought.

Teen Terrors

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I’ve been thinking about the anxieties that may invade the teen mind as it proceeds by fits and starts into adulthood. Of all the nightmare scenarios an adolescent mind can conjure: torments of bullying, of not measuring up physically, mentally, emotionally, of lacking popularity or whatever other conceived ills may occur to the teen person, all pale in comparison to the absolute horror of finding oneself to be insignificant, a nobody. You realize yourself to be forgotten among your peers not even having achieved sufficient identity to be disliked, or cancelled, you are a perpetual stranger, neither included nor excluded in any sense.

Now, clearly, such an imagined horror will never be fully realized since humankind are social animals and will seek out and find like minds, others who share interests, likes and dislikes. Even the most reticent, anti-social, awkward and unlikeable an adolescent may be there will be someone who can relate, someone to share the misery with. So, buck up, life will be tolerable and school soon a thing of the past.

An Ominous Future?

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In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel: It Can’t Happen Here, detailing the horrors of a totalitarian dictatorship. In the novel the ‘corpo’ government takes control, restrictions on personal freedoms emerge and the press becomes the voice of the state, dissidents are rounded up and imprisoned or executed and minorities become scapegoats. Young men are conscripted into the quasi-militaristic “Minute Men’ whose task is to seek out and arrest anyone suspected of subversive activities. As people began to realize their loss of freedoms mass demonstrations formed and were brutally put down by the oppressive regime

In America today we see militaristic ICE agents assaulting immigrants deporting them without legal recourse to interminable prison time in Venezuela. We see attempts to suppress free speech in the racist intentions to cancel Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs in colleges and universities. We see ICE agents removing books from public libraries which can only be seen as an attack on education.

This totalitarian wave we’re experiencing is intended to overwhelm us; resistance is necessary; silence is acquiescence.

The Dissolution of Hope

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I’ve been thinking about what happens when life imposes obstacles so overwhelming one loses the hope a better life is within the realm of possibility. A darkness settles in with the realization a livable future doesn’t exist. Socially enabling behaviors, neighborly connections, dissipate, alienation results, hostility develops, obsession finds only the enemy.

Does such a one entertain a death wish or strike back and initiate an evil response?

Moral, Amoral Immoral

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I’m wondering lately what part morality plays in our social behaviors these days, how morally ambivalent we’ve become in our acceptance of the less that morally stellar actions of some of our public figures. The ‘designer’ morality many of us assume these days lacks the omniscient overseer Christian believers have: an entity able to impose punishment or reward for behaviors well spelled out and without compromise.

However, we draw our moral guidelines it seems pretty clear that lack of any moral truths has dangerous implications for personal well-being and for our relationships with our fellow man. Amorality turns into immorality that leads to evil intent, the inclination to replace social benevolence with Will-to-Power.

A Shadow Self

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I guess it’s pretty clear that we are all innately susceptible to wicked behaviors. That, while we maintain a respectable public persona within us burns a shadow-self, a dormant entity that when motivated surfaces to exhibit behaviors that can only be described as evil.

There are various reasons why an evil shadow-self might reveal itself: fear of the Other among them. An obsessive jealousy might ignite one’s Darkside as well as vain responses to threatened identity. Instigators might arouse the shadow-selves in whole populations by demonizing a scapegoat as happened with the witch burnings during the Middle Ages and antisemitism in the 1930’s and 40’s.

When the eruption of the shadow-self occurs, our moral imperatives will likely be overwhelmed allowing our innate wicked behaviors to flood in.

A Fall From Grace

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A stable upbringing will usually set most of us on a path to becoming someone worthy of self-respect. Through responsible participation in the mechanisms that contribute to a functional society we will find ourselves woven into the social fabric of our communities, thereby garnering the respect of our peers who share our moral values. Our sense of self-worth will grow into the assumption of political power, of being a man among men.

If, though, pride-in-self becomes excessive one may slide with ease into vanity, a character flaw demanding constant reinforcing kudos. As the need for recognition grows obsession develops, becomes dangerous, finally producing a loss of identity, a non-person results, immoral, prone to unjustified retribution against imagined nemeses. An inglorious fall from grace.