We all learn at a fairly young age that the world is full of people who are not nice. Sometimes their twisted natures are obvious; too often they are sneakily concealed. These troublesome and traumatizing individuals can be our parents, siblings, teachers, classmates, colleagues, neighbors, employers, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives—or someone whom we do not know yet messes with our lives because they are able to exercise power over us and our nation.
A criminal justice system that, for example, takes an increasingly lax approach to investigation, apprehension, conviction, and incarceration makes us feel we are under siege without any protection or recourse to law. Petty crime is rampant in many major American cities, and more serious crimes such as murders, assaults, and carjackings more and more go unpunished. For example, half of the murder cases considered “solved” by Chicago police in 2021 didn’t lead to charges, but they were considered “cleared” by the police department, a bureaucratic bit of legerdemain that produced a deceptively positive data point from dismayingly negative results. It is little wonder that Americans are stocking up on guns and ammo; we have no faith in the feckless liars putting our lives at risk.
A blessing of the world we live in today is that lies and half-truths are more easily exposed; unfortunately, we are also living through a bull market in official BS. Whether we our talking about rampaging price inflation, the drug and suicide epidemics, problems with our public schools, the disasters caused by a tsunami of illegal immigration, the Green refusal to save ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, or our nation’s humiliating and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the silver-tongued purveyors of official lies are ready to obscure and ignore reality at every opportunity.
Worse yet, bullies are all around us today, and this sad fact was never more obvious than when our nation suffered a cruel incarceration imposed by fear mongers during the Covid-19 panic, which provided an opportunity to roll out new methods of psychological manipulation and test a variety of brutish governmental tools for enforcing compliance from an unwilling populace. Experiencing the tyranny of elected officials and bureaucrats ruthlessly driving businesses into ruin, destroying lives, and crushing the well being of our nation for reasons that are now too outlandish to try to explain, Americans had a foretaste of what the future might bring if an excuse for implementing the even more oppressive and refined methods of total surveillance and control now being considered are someday forced upon us.
We also learned that our faith in the American tradition of free and open debate is misplaced. Aggressive governmental censorship implemented with the covert assistance of supine and biased news and social media corporations throttled and belittled the voices of those who tried to warn of the overreaction and overreach that were the hallmarks of those Covid-19 days of 2020 and 2021. We saw a repeat of these tactics when legitimate questions were raised about how Joe Biden somehow managed to garner 81 million votes for President, which still is about as believable as the existence of Big Foot or the Loch Ness monster. Being bullied into accepting someone else’s preferred reality does not make it a truth.
Finally, we have crazies all around us. Those promoting wacky ideas care little for opinions, facts, or explanations that differ from their own whether the issue is inserting racialist indoctrination into our schools, mandating gender bending for children despite what their parents want, claiming budget deficits don’t matter, shoveling money into the war in Ukraine, insisting Marxism is dandy, assuring us Joe Biden has never taken a bribe, or reconfiguring every aspect of our economy to satisfy end-of-the-world climate cultists. We are living through a troubling era of lunacy in thought and action that endangers us all, and we are unlucky enough to have leaders who foolishly encourage these fantasies.
Our inability to solve our many problems is a direct result of the insular extremism—promoted daily by liars, bullies, and nut jobs who revel in their power and influence—that today passes for intelligence. Sadly, there is little sign our feverish beliefs will ever subside into anything resembling reasonable conversations leading to a purposeful unity. We may be able to pick up the pieces after the many catastrophes we are creating for ourselves come to pass, but until then we are likely to continue as we are—heedless of the frightening future lying dead ahead.