Losing Touch
This morning there’s little in mind. A lingering memory from yesterday; the image of a Republican lawyer at the impeachment hearings in Washington. The man speaking to a struck-dumb, packed hearing room said the president had nothing in mind, no intention, when he had the phone conversation with the President of Ukraine, Zelinsky. The conversation of relevancy was when he asked the Zelinsky to launch a public investigation of the Presidents political opponent: an investigation in exchange for weapons needed to fend off the Russian assault of Ukraine. It was a blatant blackmail proposition: weapons in exchange for political help. Such politics are soaked with blood. The President was willing to sacrifice the lives of untold numbers of poorly defended Ukrainians, civilians included, absent the requested “help”.
Yet the party-lawyer for the President asserted before the Judiciary committee that the conversation with Zelinsky involved no intention in particular because the President did not take his political opponent, Biden, seriously. It was “too early” in the election run-up to take anyone seriously. The statement was stunning, and particularly craven. Everyone in the hearing room, and every American who has even second hand knowledge of the Presidents daily twitter missives, knows the lawyer’s assertion was false, a blatant lie.
How far will the verbal and emotional violence continue, until it metastasizes into civil unrest, the outbreak of public violence, and blood?
We’ve lost touch
with reality
with Nature
with one another…
That’s why
we’re in
a total post-truth
meltdown now…
I read these lines in a recent issue of Adbusters magazine. There is nothing more dangerous to a society than the inability to discriminate between truth and untruth. Under normal circumstances sometimes effort is required to recognize a true statement from falsehood. There’s no label that you can check, “this is true” or “this one is 70% false.” What I refer to is a wholesale loss of the capacity to see what is, on-it’s-face, a lie. The citizen’s of North Korea would be an example of this condition.
The photo was captured this morning of the festive lights on a magnificent old building on 3rd street here in Geneva. In my imagination I wish that this symbolized the American state of being. I know that purity can never be said of human character. Yet, at one time America stood as a beacon of light against a dark background. I have in mind my father’s generation, that of WWII. No longer.
2 thoughts on “Losing Touch”
I wonder if the current state of affairs was inevitable. Perhaps those with enough prescient knowledge could have envisioned this era of an almost completely dysfunctional society. I’m certain that the signs were visible several decades ago, but did we as a nation choose to ignore them, believing that we could not possibly descend into the chaotic nature of disinformation, lies and brazen corruption we have become immersed in today. My sense is that there were some who could see this train coming from miles down the track and raised red flags of warning. By doing so, it was as if they were placing pennies on the track to slow down this juggernaut of insanity. It didn’t work and perhaps it couldn’t work. The very essence of human nature may be at play here and regardless of warnings (much like we have been told of the dangers of green house gas emissions altering our planet for 60 years) we do not have the mental or emotional capacity to change direction.
Some will say, “We’ll figure it out, we always have before and we’ll come up with a solution simply because we’re really clever.” Or do we just believe we’re clever and just because we’ve “figured it out” and come up with solutions to overcome many of the existential threats we’ve faced in the past, does not mean we will always be able to “figure it out” post-opening of Pandora’s Box.
There is no Mulligan we can take for the destruction of our home and environment nor does there seem to be a way of suddenly turning around the direction we have taken as a former civil society to retrieve a sense of decorum and mutual respect. The metaphor in use over and over again in the past year is that we have “gone down the rabbit hole” as a reference to Alice in Wonderland. Our world has been turned upside down and unfortunately, there is no piece of cake that says “Eat Me” that will turn us right-side up.
I wish I had a solution; a magic wand that I could wave to turn back the clock so that we could heed those warnings and take action before we trod down this path, but again, perhaps no matter what, we would have ended up right here. We are indeed an extraordinarily odd species, at once curious and brilliant and at the same time, phenomenally ignorant and stupid. What’s to be done?
Seems to me the decisive refutation of the “we’ll figure it out” assertion is the fact that there is no “outside” to the global phenomena of the rise of strongman-govt by decree, movement as democracies wain. Also with climate catastrophe, there is no boundary to the degradation of Nature and attendant severe weather events. In the past there has often been an “new” world to conquer, or a less advanced region of peoples to colonize. Not this time.