Something Happening

There something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Steven Stills

They tell us one thing. Then, take it back with the opposite.

Too late to undo the effects of flawed counsel on poor decisions.

Again, and again.

The Truth is wearing a worn and ragged coat these days. Logic has grown cold. Old, tired, breaking down … disintegrating into particles of insubstantiality.

In this era of fake news, our trust has faltered, too. For good reason.

Institutions once reliable, have let us down. Changing their rules at the whim of an agenda.

Tirelessly battering us with a singular advice-narrative over mainstream platforms of every size and color. Aborting at first breath, any alternative view that dares to take life.

Whatever happened to plurality?

A society based in freedom of speech and collective discourse – in which respect for dissent was our presumed bedrock?

And when the heck did ‘Fact-Checker’ get the sack from its job as custodian for public health and safety?

Who voted for that?

Communities – weary from years of political rancor and divisiveness. Now, as if drugged into torpor by the Morpheus of collective fear-making. All of the obedient ones, resignedly tossing their hats into the ring for more of the same.

Neighbor armored against neighbor. Co-workers and family members divided, one from the other.

A once-attentive citizenry, willingly tendering permission to relinquish their permission.

Has a pervasive, consensual terror bullied us so profoundly into complacency that we believe made-up things?

Whatever happened to “informed consent” as prerequisite to signing up for an experiment?

And, at what starting point did asking questions equate to an act of sedition?

My throat is filled with the silt of it.

Ellen Bass, from The Thing Is

Our freedom takes pause at a teetering crossroad.

Might we just double down? Push pedal to the metal and hightail it back to the ‘road less traveled’?

Staking our claim, once again, for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Or, has collective purpose faltered so desperately that we’ve lost sufficient passion and resolve to claim what is rightly ours?

Succumbing instead, to the apathy of passive horror as we witness our free society melting away — like an ice floe in warming seas.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

William Faulkner

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai Stevenson

This above all: to thine own self be true. Shakespeare

Shakespeare (Hamlet)