David Boles: Human Meme

Contempt is the enemy of We The People. Unfortunately, contempt is also the fashionable moral moment of decay today! There is a secret to dealing with, and removing, contempt in society, and you are invited to join this conversation about avoiding the contemporary rot of us.

We arrive safe from danger with these six simple words. We calm ourselves, and each other, with the direct dignity of truth. Here are those six magical words held together in a single sentence...

We have been falsely led to believe all voices matter. They do not. Some voices are practiced liars shedding the truth to cast dismay and doubt into the warp and woof of society. We stand alone in this fight to amend the record with reality because there's too much money to be made on the side, and too much power to be had in the middle -- and the uncharted result is the propagation of an untruthful plaster.

We live to thrive to be remembered beyond the rattling grave. The great human equalizer today is the ability to publish -- and to not be ignored or dismissed. In the arc of a single generation -- The Us of Us -- truly begins to matter anew as old ideas are reevaluated against fresh standards of thought, integration, and knowing before they naturally decay back into clay.

Returning home is more difficult than the first leaving. We search for the past, and yearn to find meaning in what was as the future compresses our sacred thoughts, and reveals our lost dreams. Entire political campaigns are based on exploiting this human need of a return to the familiar. Unfortunately, that place no longer exists, and the trick is played upon those who believed history can be resurrected merely by want and, by the cold fist of force.

Seeing a doctor online should be easier than visiting one in person. Unfortunately, that is not yet the case when it comes to Telemedicine. Today, you are at the mercy of a stranger who is set against you, following invisible policy, hoping for a payday, betting against the betterment of your health in the process. Yes, these are the tenets and the tar pits of today's Telemedicine. 

Community theatre brings people together -- for a price. Fame and glory do not arrive cheap. Making a name in the local theatre community often involves volunteerism, sacrifice, and a need to be recognized that transcends the economic logic of the day. The local Playhouse needs your blood, and mind, and the price you pay is -- not getting paid at all. Is the risk worth the salvage?

Here's a manifesto against deconstruction. Are we excused from being the better person because of petty disassociations from reality? If we do not offer shade on a sunny day, or protection from the rain in the gloaming -- who will? It is up to us, not them, to provide a comforting morality that is not just debased or actually superior, but merely, equal.

The Office lives among us. The lesson that television show teaches us is to know what questions to ask, and how we should choose to answer inquiries about character, motivation, fame and reticulation. We may not be funny, but we can always choose to be better. 

Now you know! Here are ten things that can help make your life better -- from shaving razors, to mineral water, to The Blues! 

A culture is always actively seeking re-definition. Things change. We are not what we were meant to become. The same is true for our stories. Where once "Tar Baby" may have been a childhood term of endearment in a folklore story from 1881, today, "Tar Baby" means entirely something else; and it is our duty to each other to learn the why of the difference when context changes.

"I support everybody because I say so." -- Everybody on the Internet. We live in a virtual world where talk tends to have more compunction power than the act of actually doing something. Listen to this call to change to move forward and to leave blood and bones split on the street.

The Hollow Men killed George Floyd. In 1925, poet T. S. Eliot wrote to expose, and to and warn us, against the invisible intentions of -- "The Hollow Men" -- and we, the people, have yet to heed his words; and so we are left behind with hunger, and anger, and illness festering in the stillborn breech between the visible and the hollow.

We have given up original thought for translation by computer. Where once we used to think progressively on our own, we now relinquish our independent thought process -- out of a warrant for a misplaced convenience -- to a mechanical process we do not control. Neural networks do not become us, they merely imitate the worst of us, and amplify our faults, temptations, and digressions in full view of the Panopticon.

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.