There are days, and this is one of them, where I feel like nothing describes the war we're in better than the Wrinkle In Time series.
It feels like we just ended up in a part of the universe possessed by something that's not just a criminal or political evil, but a spiritual one.
And there's a very real possibility that the things we value imagination, compassion, community, mystical insight, intellectual pleasure -- could lose their place in our world for a long long time.
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@Austin_Dern I mean, I have the material stuff a lot easier in a whole lot of ways. My job is kinda... America-proof since I work for a German auto consortium. I don't have any non-housecat dependents. I have a partner with incredibly good negotiation skills who makes it a LOT easier to live in close quarters.
But I think this has been usually tough on me on an abstract level, 'cause... I mean... it's like my arch-enemy showed up and after all this, I'm powerless to defeat it.
The big scary gaps in human "sanity" have been a preoccupation for me since I was, like, 11 years old and first read Sagan's Dragons of Eden. And now it feels like those gaps have become HUGE and people who haven't been gazing into them their whole lives just don't see how bad it's gotten. There's some mitigating factor that kept human behavior from going totally off the rails, and it's just... gone missing.
And it's just BIZARRE that nobody's really got any idea what to do about it. This madness should be inspiring one of the biggest spiritual/intellectual movements in history, some attempt to finally engage HOW AND WHY humans get this crazy and do something about it for good. But we can't even get a basic educational system working, let alone get people aware of the *subtle* ways our reality is a big fake.
It feels like we lost so much ground in... everything I thought the counter-culture stood for. Both sides have gone full mob-mentality and nobody's solving our problems on the Meta level. (God, this stuff is so hard to put into words.)
TL;DR: We need a real-world Doom Patrol to fight this battle on the existential and metaphysical level, and we need it real fast.
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@zebratron2084 I agree we've lost the old rails and can't see the rising of new healthier ones. Optimistically, though, I think that's because we can't see where pieces are fitting together.
When it has come, maybe we will see how the Four Freedoms and the counterculture-ashes and furries and Juggalos and those-who-walk-away-from-4chan and all were weaving an 'inevitable' good model of what society means.
The manifesto for the new and good can't come soon enough though.
@zebratron2084 Jeez. No, you're right. It doesn't feel like facing an ordinary evil; it feels like a miasma is infecting Gaia. Like ...
Well, like those crazy psychedelic skies and world-out-of-joint earthquakes and rampaging giant scorpions or whatever in _Damnation Alley_ before everybody was able to drive into Albany.