Another day, another turn of the calendar page, and today, it’s gorgeous fall foliage from Ontario, Canada. But that early kind, with lots of green and only one bare tree.
Truth be told, it doesn’t look so well, that tree.
I’m here and I’m tired, but who isn’t these days. My second cup is on the warmer, and I can only hope my brain takes notice. You never know, those synapses could get snappy.
It’s happened before.
So far, though, no luck.
I’ve been thinking about how, in a world where any fact-based debate could be settled in a fraction of an instant, the response has been to completely deny the existence of facts.
And the weirdest part about that is that people…just went along. On its face it is patently ridiculous, this embracing of “alternative facts” or claiming that we are “post fact” but all that really means is that people can make up whatever they want and you are not supposed to laugh in their faces.
We’ve really cut back far too much on laughing in people’s faces. And by that I mean specifically the ones who will leverage their ignorance for power.
Who signed up for this? Who got together and said, “OK, we’ll make facts themselves questionable?”
Because I was absent that day.
Essentially there are people in this world who are not served by objective truth. It used to be much harder to prove that they were wrong; you’d have to go to a library and find the right source and maybe even scroll through a card catalogue if you’re from the last century (and I suspect most of us from around here are).
By the time you had the facts to shove in the face of the blowhard, he (deliberate choice) was likely long gone, or had moved on to something else, or was fully prepared to pretend that was was he said and you had taken the opposite view.
Oh, old fashioned gaslighting.
But now, everyone has them at their fingertips. So what had to happen?
Sources that can say literally anything you want. Begone, fact checkers!
Objectivity has bitten the dust.
And so here we are, in a country where people can believe what they want even while the truth is draining their account at the pump and the grocery store, even while people are dying from preventable diseases, even while there is a war that hasn’t been called a war but soldiers are dying yet their families will not get the benefits they deserve, even while all the safety nets have been yanked and still we wonder at all the recalls and airline issues.
Some guy who has absolutely no authority wants to rename major bodies of water because he’s cranky and has no ketchup nearby?
Sure!
Wants to rehaul the entire voting system of a government with an order that actually has no constitutional power to do so? Who’s going to get in the way of that? Certainly not SCOTUS, they need to hustle for those “tips” they said are perfectly legal.
Amirite, John Roberts?
Wow, look at that, the old brain snapped up after all. Who knew the secret ingredient was rage.
Anyway, that’s it for me on this bleak Thursday, I hope you have a decidedly unbleak day with all the best facts.
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