There is a home in the dream that no matter who you are or where you have been there is more you can do. Unless you know the end could come you don’t live your life until your later years thinking about the end, you live it with hopes for the future. We live in a chaotic world but humanity as a species and individual societies easily forget history, even if it was just a generation or two ago. No matter who we are as a people, we fall into the same patterns, cycles and tribalism that has echoed from before language into the deep history that will always remain in the dark, full of maybes and what ifs instead of truth.
For most of us that is about finding out who you are, what you enjoy and finding purpose. Purpose can be family, friends, career, monetary accomplishments or whatever else. I lived my life without the modern version of the Internet, I had the Internet just not the version we have now. It was prior to social media, YouTube and even Google. Seeing the evolution of the Internet for good and ill has shown how we warp and use things in ways that only become apparent with time.
Looking at the shift in America, how a single person aka Donald Trump was able to warp public opinion of many and change a political party so that it abandoned its principles for pure power. You could see how the Republican Party shifted as the people shifted in order to keep and extend the power of the minority over the majority. They sought to hurt groups and individuals in the pursuit of that authority.
It shows how as dramatic change caused by the Internet, its malevolence and the dark side of how it can be used has only become starker in the years since 2016. When it comes right down to it, when a group believes something, it is really hard to confront them with the contradictions of what hey have come to believe. No one wants to believe they are wrong and it becomes significantly more difficult showing individuals that because what they have come to believe has so become reinforced over and over by mass media, their friends and their community. It becomes so ingrained that it takes so much more work and time to open up the chance to show a different perspective.
Not that their fundamental beliefs are wrong but they have been warped by those that want to use it for their ends. Trump is a liar who can’t admit he is ever wrong and if a leader cannot admit his faults how can he lead anyone to anything but ruin? The man cannot be cannot take criticism, is easy to manipulate and doesn’t believe in anything. When a person is strictly transactional how can they be trusted to be a leader when they think of themselves first and not those they represent?
You have a person who repeats lies until they become truth to their people, where anyone that isn’t with them is the enemy. America’s fall towards potential facism is scary. It shows that the United States of America is not special but just like any number of nations that have fallen to facism and or authoritarianism, hoping to take power and keep it for his people at the detriment of everyone else. At least until he finds another group to persecute.
The media has been poisoned by the need to show both sides, how used they are to the insanity that Trump spews. They don’t report on it because it has become normal when it is anything but. CNN, NBC News, Fox News and all the rest are part of the problem. They act as gatekeepers and shapers of the cultural zeitgeist, warping it not for the good of the public but for their CEO’s and shareholders. Is that ethical, is that right only they can answer that.
That is the place we are at right now, as the election approaches every democractic nation, Ukraine are waiting to see how the die will be cast and what the future will hold. I hope for a future without Trump, where a new party can be born out of the fall of the GOP and or that a new day will dawn that will turn a page on the dark of Trump.
I don’t believe in polls because they are numbers that can be made to dance based on how a question is asked, the sample size and even just how the numbers are explained in comparison to other polls. It is time for the silent majority to take a stand for a better tomorrow, to look forward and not back. To leave the orange one in the past, so he can pay for what he has wrought on America already. Cheers to a new day.