SHOCKED, but not SURPRISED
Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - daily column #6636
History will record, whether politics or pandemics, in Canada, the U.S. or anywhere else, that whatever we are fed a steady diet of, we eat it up. Whatever we hear often enough and loud enough becomes the conversation, and we believe parts of it.
Lies are lies, and the truth is elusive – and that might seem shocking, but we should not be surprised when people get confused about what to believe, who to believe, that they forget why they believe what they believe.
Every day …
News media reveals and then spoon feeds us with its shock-du jour.
We’ve grown numb to this overload, to everyone’s self-serving nature in the political and political-backer process. Controversy fuels a fire, an eternal flame of sorts, that gets stoked, so it won’t burn out, more firebrands than firefighters.
The media knows it, Trump knows it, and Republicans know it.
In Canada, our Prime Minister says his cabinet shuffle is not about election readiness, which suggests he thinks we are all collectively gullible and stupid. And given what is going in in the U.S., why would expect Canadians to not believe him automatically as a reaction because he’s not Trump, so he must be righteous and right.
Truth and power are not the same; they never were.
Power is elusive, lacks control or direction.
Truth is truth, lies are lies, and that’s the truth.
I did have a laugh yesterday, amid the Trump v. congress struggles in the final days of his presidency, in the aftermath of a riot and probably not yet the mid-point of resolution of a period of moral outrage, and in the face of another impeachment action; the PGA pulling a golf tournament away from his golf course was his pique du jour. I don’t know if that’s true, but when I heard it on the radio, it was one of the daily Trump-reveal items that sounded highly credible. And I needed the laugh.
Today is Wednesday. What is going in the rest of the world?
Besides impeachment and pandemics, there must be something important and different going on.
I’m going to make a film, I hope, and conversations about that yesterday made me smile too.
When we experience an unexpected laugh, we might be shocked, but we should never be surprised.