As Druids dance around Stonehenge, and Americans celebrate Father’s Day, Roy Edroso gives us this taste of “heritage” from the American experience, in response to the recent racist horror of the murder of nine people in a church in Charleston, S.C.
Roy’s inimitable take pulls no punches. Of course, the premise in which one can pull no punches these days is humor. People of goodwill have now been trapped by their own sense of fair play, which has metastasized as if a cancer into the premise of “everyone is entitled to their opinion,” which in turn has morphed into the concept of what was once known as the “fairness doctrine,” and in turn is a media that simply “presents both sides” of a given issue, as if each has equal truth value (or if one side has any truth value). Which, of course, is nothing other than an excuse for no one to believe anything they are told, because the one thing we do know is that much (if not virtually everything) of which we are told by politicians and the media and corporate America is complete nonsense.
Maybe, on this, the longest (and hence most sunlight-filled) day of the year, it’s time we look at reality in the daylight, for a change. Dylann Roof is a hardened racist; his own web-site says so. And yet, it is necessary that, since Mr. Roof is White, that a hate crime directed at a historic Black Church and Black victims by a White man is anything but a hateful act of racist terrorism. Fine. Just fine. And the Confederate battle flag flying over his state’s capital… is just a “symbol of heritage.” Fine. Just fine.
Hey, not even someone with the authority of His Holiness Pope Francis, apparently, can
tell us that we are destroying our own planet’s ability to sustain us, without being attacked by the usual suspects. And the result, of course, is more cognitive dissonance, because why should anyone believe anyone?
Meanwhile, in seemingly more mundane news are areas we are not really being told about much, such as the coming financial crisis which will result from a failure to resolve Greek debt issues, next step, a “summit” tomorrow.
Some snapshots.
So many things are fraying at the same time; the only response to this, or to any survival threat, is mental clarity. And yet, as Americans (or indeed, anyone in the industrialized world, or at this point, just about anywhere), the prevailing ethos is the exact opposite: self-delusion, preferably on a profitable-to-someone-else electronic device providing the latest media nonsense. And if too much reality sinks in, we have pharmaceuticals. This has been a good answer for quite a while to getting along in a largely delusional society that, at least, was apparently functioning. It’s getting clearer that now even the functioning is more delusion than reality, for more and more people. But the response is simply to double-down on the delusion.
Well, everyone has their own choice to make. You can choose to live in the ever smaller box in which our minds have been placed (and the attendant nonsense rules that go with it), or you can stop a moment, realize that some undeniable truths just are, and that those who are paid quite well to deny it because it’s in someone’s very real pecuniary interest to do so are probably a threat to your very survival, and at a minimum, you should at least recognize that fact.
I have no answers to anything right now. But at least I know the wrong questions.
tdog
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