Truth or Consequences

It’s not hard to imagine how a 21-year-old National Guard guy lost his way in our ongoing national journey into fantasy. He is both a participant in the game and its victim. The consequences of his leaking of U.S. government secrets may be enormous.

We are constantly surrounded by forces that intend, first, to confuse truth, and second, to seduce us into believing versions of “truth” that serve their purposes. No better example of this is Fox News, which knew that Trump had legitimately lost the 2020 election but continued to tell its viewers that he had won it in order to hold on to Fox’s audience and maximize its profits.

A lot of advertising works the same way: make people believe their happiness, worth, or success depends upon buying this or that elixir that we happen to be selling. Explicitly or implicitly, suspicion is planted that I am not as happy, valuable, or successful as I could be if I had that. Truth and reality be damned.

I am not into what is called virtual reality, but from what I do understand it depends upon drawing us into something more interesting, more entertaining, more satisfying than reality itself. Of course, there is that philosophical question about reality itself, about what reality really is, championed as I understand it by advocates of post-modernism, a term that continues to escape my ability to understand, as surely it is intended to do.

It’s hard to keep your eye on the ball when you are not sure the ball even exists. or when you are confronted by multiple balls simultaneously demanding your attention and response.

I claim no special ability to keep my head on straight in the middle of all this. I may be as confused as I think you are.

But however we do it, it is important to try to stay grounded in reality humanity can generally stand on and in truth we can commonly defend. After all, virtual reality is virtual and artificial intelligence is artificial. That a young man raised in so unsettled a society as ours would apparently not know how to handle information far beyond his pay grade is not surprising. And it is most troubling because he is far from alone.

Thaddeus's job

"Write a paragraph about a cat with a silly job.”

(Janine’s prompt for her second grade Abbott Elementary class)

There’s this about cats: they do not have “jobs.” You might say a cat’s only job is to take care of themself, on their own schedule. So I was surprised when our otherwise undistinguished domestic short hair, Thaddeus, started doing something regularly on his own, without being taught (as if he could have been). He began to patrol our house (well, his house) every three or four hours, like a prison guard, apparently checking every closed door to determine if it could be opened. Not that he could or would open it himself. No, he stops at every closed door, then meows until a human shows up to open the door and show him that it is unlocked and can be unlatched and that its hinges have not rusted closed. And not that he goes into whatever space the now-opened door leads to, but that he just watches it opened and, perhaps, closed again, and then moves on to the next door. He does this for about fifteen minutes before he tires of the game until next time. But perhaps the routine is not a game to him but a service to everyone in the house. After all, what if I wanted to go through some door sometime—or, God forbid, had to open a door to escape a threat like a fire or a robber—and I could not open it to save my life, all because Thaddeus had not done his job and forced me to check it regularly? I mean, what if that happened? Not silly at all, is it?