Ed 17 An outburst

 


When you can’t go fishing, there’s at least an opportunity to catch up on your thinking. Four and something years ago I blogged “over the pond, the turkeys have voted for Christmas” or some such. Who knew how bad the sh*tstorm clusterf*ck would turn out?! How did it come to this mess? The fault, as always, lies with us: humanity and its flawed vanity.

 For longer than the four years I’ve referred to, we’ve had the phenomenon of social media fuelled by the internet. Stealthily at first, anyone could say anything, no matter how dishonest or plain stupid, without censure. This bred the fakery we see in the news and in politics, throughout nearly all our societies. Every postulation (pustulation? forgive the pun) brought infinite extrapolations and variations, and any denials sank into the morass.

 Who can you trust today? Really trust? We all fear manipulation, but we give an ear to those who shout loudest (numbers of followers, posts, likes, etc.) and thus, some credibility. We badly need to return to a world where there is fidelity in what we can perceive. The liars and propagandists have to be called out. Religions used to value and promote ’truth’ (even if it was an invention), but we’ve trampled over all that; nevertheless, we need to take stock, adjust, focus and move on, leaving this era of trash behind.

 [No, absolutely nothing to do with fishing, forgive me].

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