You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

–Morpheus, The Matrix film

Chaos is a colorless and silent nothingness.  Chaos, the great impenetrable surd, our worst nightmare, the most feared of all–which every child knows well.  And every good parent attempts to reassure the child, to pay no attention to the monsters, Mommy is here.

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos, a few protective rules.  That is why we hang on to fixed opinions so much.

Things spin out of control in Washington day by day.  The trajectory can be traced prior to and leading up to the election of a president who has no sense of social norms, and has no regard for the rule of law.  It is as if we are asked to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, –when there is no longer any curtain.  Bombast, racist policies, scorched earth politics are out-in-the-open.

There is no blue pill.  The old god/gods of religion will not help us as they have been discredited by the behavior, by the incredulity of their adherents.  The secular god of the Constitution will not save us, as there is no Rosetta stone to guide us to the “correct” interpretation.  The blind literalist take on the first amendment leaves us awash in hate speech.  A literal fixation on the language of the second amendment has made gun ownership a fetish.  No need to wonder at the increase in gun violence with multiple victims.  The highest deity in our pantheon, the god of profit, results in health care being out of reach for the majority of our people.

We find ourselves addicted to the blue pill in its many forms.  As with every addiction the soporific loses its effect over time.

We must tear open the sky above us, the “protective” umbrella of received opinion, some are listed above: the old gods, the Constitution, capitalism, and I would add, the notion that America is a divinely appointed nation.  We must plunge into the chaos in order to make an opinion for ourselves, that is inclusive of all humans, of every ethnic, racial, gender and class heritage and makes the welfare of all the prime value.  We must learn how to picture this for ourselves.  We must develop a concept, a language of how to approach this desideratum over the course of time.

We must go through the catastrophe, through a conflagration in order to defeat chaos. Perhaps we will return with what is needed to lead us to composition of a better world.

There is no blue pill.