It has been 12 months since my last blog post. In a way, that blog post was the exposition and summation of an experiment perpetrated upon an unwitting society through this very blog. If there is one truth about humanity that I have gleaned from that experiment, it is that we are extraordinarily self interested and perhaps rightly so in terms of our need for survival. However, yet another truth that was revealed is that we have a tendency to perceive those things that are completely tactile as having more of an effect upon us than those issues that are more complex and harder to pin down. That makes sense.
Late last year, I took a dreadful tumble down the stairs that rendered me both incapable of driving and a whole slew of physical activity. I'm not good at being unproductive and disability, well, makes a person feel pretty useless. In fact, feeling useless has been my number one nemesis over the last year. I have to be doing something productive for society or else, I'll quite potentially implode. What can one do, though, when, as I so often put it, the only useful thing left in a person is the fact that they have a brain. Well, in my case, I accepted that personal truth and decided to try to glean whatever I could at all that is currently going on to get to the heart of all those matters.
Research, listening, observing, and examining history for correlation. Pouring over patents, scholarly articles and more. Some days, it literally felt like I was the Eye of Sauron but instead of being eyes of corruption, I willfully chose to become the eyes of objectivity. Considering how much there is a prevalence of a sort of "us v. them" mentality when it comes to just about everything that gets churned out in the media, the thing that I perceived the greatest need for was a voice of objectivity and reason. After all, an effective democracy inherently requires that its electoral base is informed.
For some who read this, they may find that to be incredibly arrogant to think that I can try to be a voice of reason and objectivity. To those, I say that you couldn't be further from the truth. I do have my own set of biases. I am more prone towards living in an environmental conscientious way. Although I do not belong to any political party, I do have a tendency to lean towards the left. Due to what occurred to my own family's business and its demise, I do have a prejudice against very large corporations and well, like many, I really don't like Walmart. However, I do not let myself get carried away with those biases to the extent of closing my eyes to the opposition's arguments.
There's a tendency to want to simplify a variety of matters into an almost black and white thinking. Just because I do have an environmentalist concern, that does not equate that I do not support business. Just because I am not fond of very large corporations, that does not mean that I do not hold some appreciation for them. Even Walmart has its function and positivity within our society as what other entity, throughout these troubled economic times, have made it so that so many people could afford to eat (though perhaps not their own employees). In other words, I do actively set aside my personal biases on a regular basis to acknowledge that each one of those oppositional views has value. In fact, I'd argue that if something did not have value within our society, then it would not exist. To me, that hits on yet another truth: it is very rare that anything is truly evil or good. In reality, there is very little that is black and white. Most things are shades of gray.
I have had people ask me why it is that I haven't written anything new on my blog over the last year. The truth of that matter is that so much of what I have uncovered in this last year has been sometimes so startling and so disturbing that words literally left me. I simply did not know what to say or even how to say it. I'm not sure if I am, in fact, capable of expressing what it is that I have seen or uncovered even now. The only thing that I know is that I have to try because to do otherwise simply renders this last year as meaningless and without point. Zero productivity. I'm not going to lie though and pretend that I'm absolutely confident that I can do adequate justice to report some of what I see as the key problems within our society today, the sources of those problems and why they exist. If anything, I feel pretty small, insignificant and uncertain and that's on a good day. On the bad days, I simply am terrified.
