Inspiration can come from odd places. The most recent one came from a RiffTrax video, poking fun at a 1976 movie made for school kids about good manners and courtesy.
In the video, the elementary school kids (all of them eggs, of course) held a flag-raising ceremony in the front lawn to start the school day, then they said the pledge of allegiance to the flag once they were in their classroom. I don’t know if kids do this kind of thing anymore (I doubt it), but I certainly did it hundreds of times in my own childhood. None of us really knew what we were “pledging” about, but it was a pleasant ritual, and I’m sure it gave most of us some basic sense of belonging to something bigger than our young selves.
Looking back, I know that I was subconsciously aware of a series of nested circles in which I was housed, and I trusted each one of them. I trust myself, my siblings, my parents, my friends, my school, my town, and my government. There was certainly badness in the world, which in those days was the Soviet Bloc, but I also had trust that the reasons for their other-ness and their bad-ness were anchored in logic and reality. The world made sense to me, and I could rely on it, starting with myself and extending outward.
What is that trust was violated from the outside, however? What if one of those outer circles pushed inward with a violation or an offense against your expectations and your trust? To take an extreme example, let’s assume you had an absolutely unshakeable belief in a supreme being, and it turns out that God was, in fact, malignant, sadistic, and destructive? That would sort of make everything else pointless, right? It would be the ultimate destruction of trust, rendering all the circles closer to you pointless.
That’s why the current environment is so unsettling to me. The world not only feels like it’s breaking apart, but my sense is that it’s only just starting to do so. The other-ness and the enemy isn’t in some strange land with some alien ideology anymore. We are collectively learning to distrust and despise one another.
This is happening in ways both big and small. Recently, some unknown quantity of disturbing cards was sent to prominent participants and influences within the Tesla orbit. The Twitter account below, for example, is a big Tesla booster (as a retail investor), and she received a slickly produced and vaguely threatening card sent to her house which had the handwritten warning “history has its eyes on you”.
We are living in dark times, and I think over the next year or two (or three) they’re going to get vastly darker. I can only take faith in what I ultimately trust. Good times and bad come and go. In the end, what is creative, loving, and honest will prevail. It’s a shame that we have to endure our fellow humans on this planet, but we do.
