Back in the 1960’s Buffalo Springfield sang a classic protest song entitled “For What It’s Worth” that seems creepily resonant today when one reads the lyrics.

Whether singing about “There’s battle lines being drawn / There’s nobody right if everybody’s wrong” or the song’s 4th verse,

      Paranoia runs deep,     
      Into your life, it will creep
      It starts when you’re always afraid 
      Step out of line, 
      the men come and take you away

it seems to encapsulate exactly the age we live in today.

Unfortunately, we now swim in a societal soup where suspicion and anger seem to be the two most predominant emotions, and one does not have to be a raving conspiracy theorist to start wondering just what is happening here in America and the world around us.

We are pouring weaponry into a meat grinder war in Ukraine that seems to lack a defined goal or strategic purpose beyond goading Russia into dropping more bombs on civilian targets. Emptying our stockpiles of critical munitions in this fashion also leaves us ill-prepared to meet a looming threat of armed conflict with China in order to defend Taiwan. Given the deep and peculiar financial ties between President Biden, his family, and key members of Congress with Ukraine, one has to wonder about the true motivations for this seemingly unending gusher of billions of dollars in aid, much of it very poorly accounted for.

Is our policy in Ukraine right, wrong, or just official corruption where everything and everybody are for sale—and right and wrong are abundantly meaningless concepts?

Tracking the odd coincidence of former President Trump being charged with violations relating to the possession of classified documents the same week that the FBI, pushed to the wall by House Republicans, finally released documents implicating President Biden in the receipt of a $5 million dollar bribe from an energy company in (surprise!) Ukraine, one cannot but suspect a concerted—perhaps even conspiratorial—effort to distract attention from an abundantly impeachable offense committed by Joe Biden to enrich himself and his family. 

Shoving the Bad Orange Man back on stage does not comprise a defense against charges that then-VP Biden was in the habit of using his office for personal gain. Moreover, the contrast between the Department of Justice’s stunning indifference toward Joe Biden’s own mishandling of classified documents—some of them stored for years in his home garage—and the hammer now being dropped on Donald Trump seems indicative, until more details are forthcoming, of a politically-motivated effort to either kneecap or completely remove the Republican frontrunner heading into the 2024 Presidential election.

Paranoia need not strike all that deeply for legitimate questions to be raised about the conduct and intent of federal prosecutors in this case. If President Trump’s document handling was, in fact, so very worrisome, it makes one wonder how former Secretary of State—and 2016 Democratic candidate for President—Hillary Clinton avoided being charged with mishandling classified documents when she was storing them on an unsecured and thoroughly illegal personal server in her own home? Justice unequally applied looks a lot like favoritism or retribution.

The partisan battle lines that are being drawn on a whole variety of political and cultural topics today both define and reinforce the paranoia that is infecting every aspect of our nation’s discourse. One does not need to spend much time surveying the national conversation before one hears labels such as white supremacist, fascist, hater, sexist, and worse being tossed about like confetti at a parade. This is all amplified, magnified, and weaponized by those seeking money and power, which has been the human condition back throughout recorded history, but our intrusive and omnipresent media technology allows for a drumbeat of repetition that approaches brainwashing in its intensity, and it is sadly easy to see where the biases of those seeking to twist our thoughts now lie.

And speaking of technology, the breathtaking improvements in Artificial Intelligence that seem to arrive with each passing week are expected to be a jobs transformer—and jobs destroyer. We also cannot help but believe that AI will be a new tool for the surveillance, manipulation, and censoring of our thoughts and actions. Add to this the predictions by many who study Artificial Intelligence that this has the potential to outpace humanity’s ability to control it—putting our very existence at risk—and it is easy to be wary of what lies ahead. Whatever does happen in the next few years, all we can be sure of is we will be poorly prepared for the consequences. 

Doubts? Fears? Suspicions? Divisions? Our lives during the next few years will certainly be interesting. But likely not very pleasant.