It's been a long time since my last post.
Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that means I've been too busy with more rewarding ventures.
Nah. The lack of writing is just an indication of the malaise of summer and a fading desire to focus too much on any one topic. That is not to say certain things haven't crossed my mind during the dog days. Questions and observations seem to come in waves as one sits back and ponders it all.
For instance, the other day I was thinking about what our parents and teachers told us when we were children, and how much of it has turned out to be false.
Remember how we weren't supposed to sit too close to the television set, let alone touch the screen? Well, now many of us have to make a living doing just that -- sitting inches away from 27-inch computer monitors for hours. Heck, I remember when the biggest TV was 19 inches and my father said I would go blind or get brain cancer if I sat within 10 feet of it.
And then there are tablets.
Our fingerprints are all over our Kindles and iPads. Go to an Apple store and you'll be exposed to more germs than you will find on a toilet seat at a truck stop. Shouldn't these touch-screen devices carry some sort of warning label?
How about food? Red meat and whole milk were supposed to be good for us when we were kids. Now we're told that those items will send us to an early grave.
I was taught not to lie. Now being deceitful is practically a national past-time. You see it in advertising and politics. We are encouraged by otherwise respectable folks to inflate our qualifications when going for a new job or promotion. We color our hair to shave off a few years. We get cosmetic surgery in order to support the lies. We hire attorneys to lie for us when we can't keep our lies straight. And we reward them when they win.
Corporate lies have become particularly popular. Many large businesses have entire teams of professional "communicators" who will lie to employees, the public or the government, particularly in times of crisis or transition. Of course, government practically invented the institutional lie, so what goes around comes around, I guess. It often feels like part of some societal dance -- a dance of survival and getting ahead, no matter the cost.
I've been thinking about trivial stuff, too, like why we don't hear of reports of UFOs anymore? Can't recall the last time there was a well-publicized sighting. You would think that with everyone on the planet carrying smartphones with high mega-pixel cameras built in, this would be the golden era for visual proof of alien ships hovering on the horizon. Instead, it now appears that all of those grainy UFO photos from yesteryear might have been fraudulent? Either that, or the aliens decided not to visit Earth anymore.
Politics creeps into my mind still, in a more personal way, that is. I now wonder how I could have gone from moderately conservative to somewhat liberal. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? Aren't we supposed to be liberal when young and idealistic, and grow more conservative with age and a greater sense of reality?
Modern-day Republicans jumped the shark in recent years and made it impossible for a lot of people like me to support conservative values anymore. As fair-minded people, we had no choice but to move to the left. The right seems bent on taking us back, and worse, just make up crazy and dangerous stuff as they go along. As Will McAvoy (the fictional news anchor on the HBO show The Newsroom) said in the series finale last Sunday, the Tea Party and right-wing extremists are, in essence, the "American Taliban." Yes, these people on the fringe scare me.
It amazes me that Mitt Romney is running even with President Obama in most polls. I mean, it's stunning to watch. Stunning. Granted, Obama should have paid more attention to the economy, but does that mean we have to punish him by electing a guy who doesn't know what a doughnut is, who caters to the American Taliban and hides his money overseas while trying to make us believe he's for the middle class?
I recently said I wouldn't write much about politics anymore. The lack of honor in our political system has become too depressing. I have made an attempt to watch less political news while tuning in to more baseball games this summer. But, of course, it's almost impossible to avoid the political ads, which brings me back to lying.
Have you seen the ad where Romney and Obama are on a stage together behind podiums, in a debate setting? Uh, did the right-wingers who made that commercial think we are so easily fooled that they could show an image of a debate that hasn't even happened yet? And what's with slow motion? Why is it that whenever a candidate is portrayed as the anti-Christ in a political ad, he or she is shown in slow motion? Is there something evil about slow motion? Should I not be watching slow-mo replays during football broadcasts to avoid demonic possession?
I know what you're saying by now. What the heck is this post about? Slow motion, demonic possession, whole milk, red meat, UFOs and political transformations?
Well, as I warned you in the beginning, this post wasn't going to have one obvious message. My thoughts move from decade to decade, subject to subject in no particular order or priority lately. Yet, if you look a little deeper, there is a message here.
For better or worse, things do become clearer with age and experience, yet the dots are harder to connect in this ever-changing, complex world, which is the opposite of how I felt at 25. Then, the dots seemed easy to connect, but life itself was filled with deceptive distractions and false assumptions ... and maybe fewer dots.
