Made a bit of progress today, a step forward. I got some tax stuff done. I made some progress toward getting cars scheduled to be worked on. I finished my laundry. So… some progress.
As much as I’ve wasted a lot of time in uselessness and worse than uselessness in front of screens, I’ve also learned some important things as well. I’ve had even more deeply embedded in me how important it is that I be slow to think I understand things.
For example, do you remember that “frivolous” lawsuit from a couple of decades ago when the lady spilled McDonald’s coffee on herself and then sued McDonald’s? Headlines made it all sound frivolous. Turned into the poster child for ridiculous lawsuits. I certainly bought into that narrative. The problem?
Well, decades later, actually learning about the lawsuit, I realized it wasn’t frivolous after all. It wasn’t what everyone made it sound like it was. McDonald’s was well aware they were heating their coffee too hot (190 degrees). They’d had numerous other accidents with numerous injuries and hadn’t stopped the problem from happening. And this woman, yes, spilled it on herself, but it was so hot that it caused third degree burns in her pelvic area that required skin grafts and something like two years of recovery. And what did she ask for, the 79-year-old lady? She didn’t ask for millions of dollars. She asked for just enough to cover the medical bills. That’s it. The end.
Anyway… It just cements in me more and more how little I trust anything that I hear from pretty much anywhere. Over and over and over and over again I learn that I can’t trust what is said/shared/told me.
It’s ironic. So much information is available today, and… I trust just about none of it. “Fake news” became a bell word/thing during Trump’s time in office. Well… I certainly agree with it, but from all sides. You can find pretty much anything you want to prove any position you want for just about any thing you want anywhere. What is the truth?
Who knows.
The left peddles their propaganda. The right peddles their propaganda. It’s so ridiculously obvious as I read through their web pages. I bounce around from left to right to whatever I find when I try to “catch up” on what’s going on, and just so… ridiculous. Opinion rules. Everyone has an agenda. Those agendas are really obvious in a lot of ways and really subtle in others. The truth doesn’t seem to matter. News outlets say whatever will keep their ratings high and their consumers happy, and they promote their agendas at the same time, twisting perceptions, stoking fires, reinforcing attitudes and beliefs…
Sorry, that’s a lot of negative when it started out positive.
I just want to find a way to shine a light on it all and expose it for what it is. Are we really so blind as an American people? Do we really not see? Are we really so easily herded around to where our media and political leaders want us to be? Do we really believe that these people all around us are so bad? That the “other” side is so awful and hateful and dangerous? Or am I just so naive to believe that the majority of us can peel back the crap and see that we’re mostly really good at heart?
(sigh)
Gotta find a way through this. Group think is killing our nation. Hope there’s a way to fix it. Personally, I believe we’re getting very close to a critical junction in human history where technology is going to make it possible to control people and cause massive destruction but on local, personal levels (as opposed to nuclear devastation where massive swaths of society are destroyed).
Hope we can overcome the negative aspects of our human nature in time before we destroy more of our freedoms and eventually each other.
(sigh)
Sorry, not so positive of a post.
But… here’s to a better tomorrow. Fight for peace and love and understanding to the dying breath, right?
Right.
Lift the World 
If we, as a society, want to survive as a society, we need shared values. I believe most people share a base set of values. We just need a way for people to see through the manipulative noise. For some, it is too late. But I have hope. Humans are born with the desire to cooperate with each other, the need to belong. We need to start in schools teaching critical thinking, media awareness, compassion, the golden rule. Not radical stuff. Just the bedrock of an educated populace. Because democracy only works in an educated populace. And I don’t believe the originators of America meant college, or highschool, but foundational education. We need a concept of America we can all believe in again. I don’t want to go back to believing in the Santa Claus America, that glossed over and hid horrible things with beautiful stories. I mean an adult America – aware of it’s past mistakes and responsibly aware of it’s actions to work together for a socially sustainable future. (End soap box)
Yes, very tired of the manipulative noise. And I’m also concerned about our rapid advance in technology coupled with our *lack* of advance in our humanity. We’re not far from genetic engineering of humans (we’ve already started, but crazy stuff). We’re not that far from being able to hack brains, for upload, download, and control. We’re not that far from being able to create deadly, untraceable micro weapons people can use to kill each other. It’s… A nutty how close we are to some really scary technologies that can, on the one hand do so much good, but as we’ve seen throughout human history… also get used for awful purposes. Hope we’re able to check ourselves fairly quickly.