It occurred to me that a lot of words we use represent abstractions, ideals to be striven toward which have no actual foundation in the world. Justice seems a good one. We've all been hearing it or saying it for years – “with liberty and justice for all” - such brazen malarkey. Even the concept of justice requires oppression – a higher power presiding over us meting out punishment or reward. Yet this is the pinnacle of society's hopes. We assume it our birthright and justification for all manner of violations. This word keeps the rabble confused and on an endless scavenger hunt, trying to locate it so we may stand under and be subjected to its purifying power. You, too, can receive justice, my son.
Lately the search has been refined. Now we're looking for “social justice.” Many of us still searching for the regular kind must look up from the old quest and move to a new one, having received no instruction for how to tell one from the other. Just my luck, now I'll probably find plain old justice. I wonder if it still works. But hey – maybe I can pretend it's social justice and nobody will be the wiser.
One useful ability would be to recognize crumbs when we see it. Crumbs from the giant cake eaters above us who need not waste their time searching for justice, lacking any need of the stuff. It's not for them. They strive for real things. To them it's just ice.
And now you've got people saying black lives matter. Which obviously, if you have to say it, they don't. But there it is anyway, a perfectly reasonable, humble statement, hard to argue with in any sensible way and then here comes the blue lives faction, equating black people with Smurfs. No wonder black people are pissed off. Not that I'm saying anything against Smurfs, you understand. Hey – maybe the Smurfs are pissed off. What do you get when you combine black and blue? You get bruised, that's what. And by the way, who are these people talking to? Not the best and the brightest, I'll tell you. You got to be pretty stupid if people mattering is big news to you. Even if they matter only to themselves.
I never saw a sign saying white lives don't matter. You got a white life? I'm sorry. But you just got to get on with it.
I've been thinking for awhile that Donald Trump becoming President of the United States of Addiction was a harbinger of absurdities to come because very simply, if that could happen, anything can happen. And it certainly has been. That seemed to be the moment we stepped over the line and down the rabbit hole. Good and evil are not entities but one trend seems to be the rise of stupid. Stupid dominates “the media” and having poured into peoples' eyes and ears, it frequently pours back out their mouths. And proudly so, proud to be an orifice for spewing digital thought. It reminds me of a line from The Flight of the Phoenix leveled at the main character - “You have made ignorance a virtue.”
But then I remembered that stupid has been romping about since the hayday of George Bush. That was when Americans started to seem able to swallow and parrot any illogical, nonsensical malarkey if it came to them from on high. Jabberwocky like “George Bush (the man who presided over the only foreign attack on the continental U.S. in over 200 years) kept America safe,” went absolutely unchallenged by anybody with a large audience until, ironically, the current dufus pointed out how ridiculous that claim was. I personally almost went insane from hearing men say, “I'm sure glad Al Gore wasn't president when that happened.” Why??? Because he would have handled it worse?
So now I'm thinking 2000 marks the rise of stupid in the U.S. A lot of people thought O'bama meant a fresh start but apparently that was only an intermission.
Interestingly, all this stupid lies solely in the realm of subjects covered by “the media.” Politics has become a battleground for a dependant, wage enslaved, voyeuristic people who live the same day and even the same tv shows and now already decided football games, over and over again with no risks and no glory, deprived of real combat in life and sorely in need of it. Probably with no new football, manly men will become even more invested in their political beliefs to carry them there. Say what you want about peace, it can be found only in victory. The Klingons are us, not the Federation.
In all the important intellectual areas, the personal, independent thoughts and experiences that can't be covered on the web, people still speak and behave normally. As nature intended it. She always wins in the end.
So it's not that Americans themselves are more stupider these days. They just say more stupider thingaroos and are louder bullhornier so other people more hear it. It's the peopler times we virate in. It's a game.
