David Boles: Human Meme

Democracy demands comity from those who lead us. If, and when, that kindness falls, everyone in the community is at risk of being forsaken and forbidden from free thought. The winners in any context are required by morality and higher purpose to abide by, and support, the dreams of the losers -- if not, the entire world collapses into a distant, but purposeful, cruelty. 

Discovering new worlds begins in the constructed word. We descend into darkness together, to discover the light hiding below what we know. The secret to surviving a world afire is knowing how to extinguish threats to liberty, and freedom, with reading comprehension and a sharp thought.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn understood Art can fight violence. What happens when violence becomes an Art? What happens next when a nation is cleaved into The City and The Valley by purposeful, political, rage, and there's no way to negotiate the differences in the home? Violence then becomes the remedy in the crevasse, and not a tenterhook for reconciliation. 

Some eat all evidence of the living. Hunger, hubris and wanting to be fulfilled are all notes of advocacy for those among us who are able to successfully erase a carcass -- or a corpse! -- before our disbelieving eyes. They eat to be fulfilled. They swallow to erase. They digest to rewrite history. The result of the cleansed plate is a palate of soul destroying musk. 

We are made to magnificently fail. In the ever going onward march from humility to humanity, we search for signposts that we are on the right path. The Artist and the Poet both share in the re-stitching of our souls, and so we look to them to divine the precious secrets to surviving a perilous life of sorrow.

We are only the skin and steel of what we used to be while alive. Today, we are stuck in the Uncanny Valley, put here by a virus, kept here by a pattern of disinformation, and by the threats of low information fools who only wish to keep us down, and locked away, in the name of a democracy that no longer exists.

We are only as good as what cannot be proven. Have you heard about the military biolab next to the Wuhan wet market? Did you know FEMA is stealing from Blue States to poison Purple States? What do you think about ER doctors being fired for telling the truth about what's really happening with ventilators? These are the not-so-evident self-truths that plague us today.

Now is the time to grieve for what will be lost. As the pandemic bears down upon us, we are left to wonder not about what we have already lost, but what will forever be forgotten into the future. We want what we cannot have. We yearn for what can never be recovered. We will have to learn again how to live in the moment, and how to appreciate these shared moments in real time.

We are reaping the whirlwind. The pandemic is upon us and we are flying, seedless, into the horizon with no foundation to root us. Schools are closed. The Palisade is staked. Every step we take is ground zero. We meet a new friend and saw off our arm. Are we there yet? Oh, yes, we are there yet.

How do we handle a perfectly designed killing machine? The Covid-19 Coronavirus appears to be a unique delivery system intentionally constructed for killing people. How does something so intrinsically effective sustain into being beyond the natural world? How many valves are left for us to turn down? How quickly will "social distancing" become "social retribution?" These are some of the vital questions we ask today of the virus that now rules us. 

Will there be singing? We are now living in a time and space in which we did not predict, or choose, and do not want. We are distanced, infected, and alone. Today, we turn to Bertolt Brecht and Emily Dickinson for resolution in the conclusions of our damaged human conflict; and we find ourselves irreparably caught in the drift between the abyss of scientific truth and the sacred heart.

We are created to fail. With the rise of the Coronavirus to pandemic levels, we are reminded of a dramatic Public Health Crises scenario where only some of the following people were offered a magic pill to heal their bodies from the plague: a toddler, a soldier, a priest, a grave digger, and a public health worker. Who would you choose to survive the last days with you?

We run from each other by canceling those we wish not to understand. We are surrounded by concepts, and notions, we cannot abide, and so we cancel the person -- instead of coping with fresh ideas -- by canceling the noise they create around us; but to cancel noise, is to nullify life itself.

We become our addictions. All our lives we race from the aftereffects of caffeine all while running headlong into belonging to that jolt of a manufactured high. Do we owe it to our children to remove the caffeine and sugar temptations before they rot from the inside out? 

It is always not done that a professor seduces a student; but it always does seem to happen. Professors must hold their morality to a higher standard than that of the whims of the body. It is never acceptable for a professor to socialize, or sexualize, the student/teacher relationship. Unfortunately, too much of that brain-to-body trickery is still in play today on college campuses, and the result is the skinning of the student.

The Deaf deserve their culture. Is there a legal definition for Deafness in the law that prevents the Deaf from interacting with a real, and not imagined, life? Are there any protections in place for infants, born Deaf, that guarantees them the right to grow into their Deaf culture, and to appreciate their Deaf language, without parental, and medical, intervention to “fix” their “broken” ears into “Hearing” without the consent of the intervened?

How do we know what we don't know? How do we know what we're missing if we've never been taught what to have? Google solves this problem of access to behavior modeling that many of us, born before the internet, have failed to acknowledge. We had to try and fail everything on our own. Today, kids can build on their successes by using only what has already been proven to work.

We used to say goodbye; now we're left only with hello. There was a time when the day ended. We threw away the newspaper. We said our nightly prayers before entering sleep. Our radio and TV shows signed off the air and left us with white noise and nothing to do but contemplate the results of our day. What happens to us when we no longer have the escape of turning off while trying to live an alive life? 

Embrace your sorrows, for they define you. Too often we become obsessed with happiness when sadness is the authentic and verifiable emotion that drives us and defines our daily lives. The context of sorrow is what frames our expectation against a fleeting joy.

What happened to the Hershey's Chocolate Bar? What happened to the American Tootsie Roll? Tastes didn't change. The economy changed our tastes. The bottom line turned a candy delight into a chalky turd. Where once we salivated for a chocolate treat; now we only spit out its remains.