A Different View!

It is like looking through the binoculars the wrong way.  I'm expecting to see a close-up view and instead everything is far away and small.  That's the way it is these days as I try to make sense out of what I see happening in my country.

What I've realized is that I expect to see things the way they were when I formed my picture of how they should be, which I did a long time ago.  It is a form of bias confirmation.  I want to validate my presuppositions, and when I see that the world today is not the way I want it to be I am at least disappointed or more likely pissed off.

Unfortunately for me, yesterday is gone and there is nothing I can do to get it back.  Like it or not, and I definitely don't like it, I am living in today's world.  So I have a choice.  I can continue to look through the binoculars the wrong way and have the view distant and unavailable.  Or I can turn it around and have a close-up view of the way it is.

For my brain, the choice is not difficult.  I live in the present, so get with the program and stop complaining.  In my gut, though, I haven't come to terms with giving up on how I want it to be.  I keep thinking there must be something I'm not seeing.

To be continued . . .

Our Species!

If I step back and widen my view from here, close to home, to the world beyond, what I see is a similar picture: the rise of autocracy and not far behind - fascism.

And if I look at history this isn't the first time we've experienced this phenomenon.  It's a repeating pattern of what our species does, how we treat ourselves and others.  Not only do we not learn from the past, we become better at repeating our mistakes.  It's like being self destructive is part of our DNA.

So what to do - if anything?  We could stop trying to change what appears to be inevitable and just sit back and let it happen.  But that would be giving up, and another part of our DNA doesn't want to go down this path.  We could try something new, but given our history we don't appear to be capable of fundamentally altering the paradigm.

For now, I think I'll take a longer view, made possible by the pictures of the universe from the James Webb telescope.  What is our place in the trillions and trillions and trillions of galaxies?  We're such a minor player in the greater scheme of things we barely exist.  If our species has a limited life expectancy it really makes no difference, does it?

Our ego makes us care.  I think I'll leave it at that!