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[solarpsychedelic]

Another issue that angers me is the enshrinement of ahistorical attitudes and insistence on willful ignorance.

Education means the world to me. Some of my education was the result of privilege and I acknowledged that by finding ways to “pay it forward” with volunteering and in my career as a historian and archivist.

The other part of my education though was from my own initiative and something I worked hard to acquire. Following Ray Bradbury’s advice, I started my extra education at the public library and then the internet. I have spent countless hours reading, reflecting, and learning with a wide variety of resources and engaging with a wide variety of thoughts, points of view, and opinions.

If I learned my views were outdated or incomplete I did what I could to self correct. I learned how to temper emotion with reason and to respond rather than react and to know that sometimes it was better to walk away from a bad situation than to stay and waste my time and energy with useless arguments.

I learned these things not only because they were personally valuable because that was how adults were expected to behave, i.e., with a certain amount of sobriety, discretion, and diplomacy.

Well that’s all gone out the window. Now we reward immature people and denigrate science and education. 

For centuries, the inner life created by art, music, literature, and reflection on those things sustained people through bad times. But in our current hellscape, these parts of life only have merit if they make money, or create algorithm spikes, or pass purity tests. And that’s a cheap, shallow, reactive, and empty way to look at human life.

Of course, we need to ask, cui bono? To whose benefit is it that we should be reduced to such a stupid state?

Dr. Salk was a hero and a healer. I shudder to think how today’s cretins would treat him. Why would anyone purposely want to bring fatal diseases back… unless it somehow benefitted them if others died.

That’s dark but that’s where we’re at.