Category: Politics

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The first time I ever encountered a conspiracy theorist I was 16 years old and out in the door to door ministry with some fellow teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was mid-summer, a really hot one, and I was paired up with Bobby Norbohm. We went to a door and knocked and a little old man answered the door. He was short, slim, rosy skin tone, a halo of white hair, and oddly enthusiastic about our visit. He invited us in to his air conditioned living room and offered us beverages. Witnesses face a lot of rejection in the door-to-door game, quite a lot, so a cool room on a hot day with a friendly face is rather welcome. Also, Bobby’s green 1970-something GM Behemoth didn’t have air conditioning, you just had to roll the windows down and sweat all over the pleather.

I got no hint of threat, no sense of anything inappropriate, he just seemed like somebody who wanted to talk, and so I plowed into my presentation of the magazines or books or whatever it was I was presenting that day. I can’t recall but that’s mainly because of what happened next. He brushed aside everything I was trying to sell him to hit me with a counter-offer. He wanted to tell us the score. He took out a well used and clearly loved Bible and started countering my scriptures with scriptures of his own and in mere minutes we were deep into dueling interpretations of the book of Daniel. Now, I don’t know that I can adequately describe how spectacularly unsettling it was to have a householder who was a) even more Biblically literate than I was and b) equipped with an equally intricate net of theology. Witnesses treat the Bible like it’s a giant puzzle that explains itself through tens of thousands of cross-references between the different pieces and they have the only key to correctly understanding it. Rarely if ever do they encounter other people out in the wild who have the same basic approach but reach different conclusions. I was at a loss and so was Bobby, but the visit hadn’t yet gotten supremely weird. It was just uncomfortable to feel, for the first time I could remember, like there was a chance the householder actually knew the Bible better than I did. How could I preach to a person like that?

As it turned out, that was just the warm up. The little man was vigorously surfing scripture upon scripture to illuminate his interpretation of a prophecy about the tribes of Israel, connecting current events and the world situation to his scriptures as I struggled to find the scriptures in my own Bible fast enough to keep pace when he suddenly started talking about Maitreya. Who or what was Maitreya? Good question. Apparently, Maitreya was/is a guru/teacher/leader who has taken over the United Nations and all the major world governments, presenting himself as a benevolent and wise entity, but who is actually (surprise!) Satan. According to our host, Maitreya appears and disappears at will at gatherings of the rich and powerful, and they do whatever he asks them to do. Maitreya is charismatic. Maitreya is devious. He’s the devil and you cannot take his picture, for some reason.

I asked why, if all of this is true, I have never heard the name Maitreya in my life. Also, much of his supporting material for these claims involved the Illuminati and Freemasons and “history” I had never heard of. I asked him how he could possibly know all of this when it wasn’t in history books or the library or encyclopedias. This was the late 1980’s and the internet wasn’t a thing outside of universities and government agencies. He said that the real truth was never published because the government controls the libraries, the television, the radio, the newspapers, but he knew the truth because he had connected, via computer, to other people who knew the truth. He even had a picture of Maitreya printed out that he could show us.

That was his first major slip up. He said he had a photo of the devil who he just said could not be photographed and seemed not to notice the inherent contradiction. What was going on here?

I had never before heard the term “conspiracy theorist”. The X-Files wouldn’t make it’s debut for about another 4 years. I didn’t even have a term in my vocabulary for a person like this. I was creeped out and kinda fascinated and he just kept spinning more weirdness. Pretty soon there were alien lizard people and god knows what else involved in the alternate universe he was describing. Bobby and I started giving each other nervous glances and seeking a graceful escape. This man was as deep down the alternate reality conspiracy rabbit hole as anybody I’ve since met and he was apparently doing this, erm… research(?) entirely via pre-internet dial-up bulletin board systems.

By the time Bobby and I did manage to extricate ourselves and return to our sweltering, partially melted, compatriots, my eyes had been opened not to the lizard people, Maitreya, the lost tribes of Israel or the Illuminati but rather, to the idea that there were people who were trading and consuming underground “knowledge”. Off the books, unauthorized, unofficial. Claims and theories and speculations, oh my. Had the story ended there it would have been sufficiently strange to my teenage brain but there is a slightly disconcerting coda. A couple of days after that visit with the old man, a book appeared on the doorstep of our house. It was just sitting on the front step, no note, no explanation. It was a book about everything the guy had been talking about, his entire spiel of weirdness, all the conspiracy kook stuff, in a paperback, sitting on my goddamn front step.

To this day I have no idea how he found out where I lived but he obviously did. I was so freaked out by the book that I destroyed it. Tore it to pieces, threw it away. I thought about burning it.

A few years later there was the X-Files and the internet and I started to become more and more aware of the world of conspiracy theories. The JFK assassination, the moon landing, subliminal Disney porn, the secret leaders of the world, Area 51, etc, etc, etc. We all did, as a society. We collectively became acquainted with and absorbed the fact that there are people who believe all this alternate history and alternate reality stuff and, collectively, we considered it to be great entertainment and mostly harmless but I have never forgotten the passion in that man’s voice, the fervor of a true believer preaching The Truth About Everything, and he would know, because he had the photos. Did I want to see them?

I write all of this because here we are, 30+ years later, and instead of a rare, fascinating, troubled soul tilting at windmills from his dial-up modem, connecting with the handful of people like him who Know It’s All A Lie, we have a president and millions of people in the country who believe some set or subset or parallel to the same wildly fantastic nonsense that man believed. They don’t have to work for it, don’t have to plumb the depths of BBS systems and trace teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses to their homes, they just have to take their phones out of their pockets, open a social media app, and pretty soon QAnon shoots straight into their eyeballs from the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. I can barely fathom how weird it is, that in my lifetime, the entire concept of objective reality, trusted news sources (Walter Kronkite! Dan Rather!), and a shared understanding of the world has come under such threat, such assault, that I think back to Maitreya Man as the earliest canary in the coal mine of modern life.

Maitreya Man is probably no longer with us, he would likely be pushing 100 by now, but the way he thought, the ways he conducting “research”, the fascinating combination of high intelligence with an out-of-control pattern recognition function in his brain that caused him to see connections literally everywhere, the paranoia and delusion that must have fed him, and the fledgling underground community of which he was a part, this stuff became a business model and a poison that has penetrated into every nook and cranny of our society. Technology has enabled and accelerated it and allowed all the various conspiracy theories to mutate, adapt, flourish, grow, and draw eyeballs and mindshare. The Left-leaning fringe is prone to this type of “thinking”, and generally always have been, but the heart of the Right, the absolute MAGA core of one of the two major political parties in this country, has completely embraced the insanity, which is frankly even more surprising. I mean, the conservatives of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, these were not the people who believed in alien lizard people, these were the salt of the earth types, they vaccinated their livestock and their kids, they were proud that America beat the Russkies to the moon and in the Cold War, they didn’t go in for any of that crazy talk, and now they can’t even agree the earth is round and a shocking percentage of them believe Hollywood actors drink baby blood or something batshit insane like that.

How on earth did the most normal of normal people get turned into raving Maitreya Men and Maitreya Women?

Sure, the answers are there. Alex Jones, Fox News, Trump, Facebook, blah blah blah, they are clearly being exposed to more outlets of disinformation that is divorced from reality than they are chemtrails, but my god, what can be done about it? Anything? Are we just all doomed to live in a world now in which a huge number of people aren’t really sure whether or not reality is… reality? Where evidence against the things they say is either ignored or converted into evidence for what they say? Because let’s be honest here, none of this would be happening if there wasn’t money being made on peddling disinformation, conspiracy, and crackpot bullshit. As long as a market exists there will be sellers. The only possible solution is to reduce the number of people who are vulnerable to falling for this stuff. Every insane conspiracy theory has a website somewhere debunking all of it’s claims. Sometimes I read these things just for fun, keep an eye on the state of the state and all that. The theory sites have certain things in common. They tend to make grandiose statements without evidence, they usually make a lot of claims that all fail, on their own merits, to stand up to critical scrutiny but together are considered “a pattern”, they commit logical fallacies, they contradict their own logic, etc. The debunking sites usually take on the “evidence” with actual evidence, point by point, and demolish the theory and it makes no difference whatsoever. The Sandy Hook Massacre was a False Flag. NASA never landed on the moon. Fluoride is for mind control. Hillary Clinton is a lizard person. Michelle Obama is a man. On and on and on, evidence be damned.

The debunking approach, satisfying as it may be, doesn’t work for the simple reason that believers never visit debunking sites. If they are directed to them by a loved one, they may grudgingly look at the site for two seconds but they immediately reject the debunker as somebody who doesn’t get it or a tool of the masterminds behind the conspiracy. Of course the Freemasons have a website demonstrating that the moon landing was real! That site is part of the wool being pulled over your eyes sheeple!

So, if we can’t debunk our way out of this, what do we do? How do we get through to somebody who is in the grip of an induced delusion/psychosis, in the sway of a maniac cult leader like Donald Trump who is retweeting QAnon lunacy? This is no longer one isolated old man in a basement, this is tens of millions of citizens of this country. This is terrifying. What can possibly be done? I am sad to say, I offer no solutions, no hope. I have never won an argument with a conspiracy theorist, never seen a case where they turn around and come back to consensus reality. I’ve never heard of anything that works to right this wrong when it occurs in a human mind. I’d love a glimmer of hope, if you have any to offer. Please.

Failing that, can I please just suggest, humbly, that we all do our best to make critical thought respected and valued again and look for ways to fight this collective mental virus? We can’t be a functioning society if 30-40% of us believe an alien cabal of lizard people is eating babies and one of them is George Soros and he faked the death of Hugo Chavez as part of a plot to steal the 2020 election by reprogramming all the voting machines so that nobody will uncover the secret that NASA faked the space program by building cellular towers that caused coronavirus and the earth is actually flat and somehow the LGBTQ+ are in on it too but I’m not sure why or how yet but also Starbucks coffee cups hate Christians. Or something. This is not sustainable and it’s not something we can argue and debunk away.

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I had a bit of an epiphany last night.  I don’t know if it’s particularly profound, but I feel like my eyes were opened to a few truths that I have long known and simply forgotten to apply in my life.

First thing.  I have been a music person my entire life.  I have listened to music, thought in music, sang to myself in the car, in the shower, written my own songs, recorded music, performed music, learned instruments, collected music, obsessed over music.  I know people who maybe own two or three CDs and casually listen to Spotify, you know, normal people.   In contrast, I have literally thousands of albums in numerous formats: vinyl records, shellac 78s, CDs, cassettes, reel to reel tapes, digital files, you name it.  OK, I don’t have any 8-track carts, gotta draw the line somewhere, but I do actually own a functional hand-cranked Columbia Grafonola record player. 

I’ve personally been involved with and worked on the recording of at least 40 recorded albums or singles as either a performer, engineer, producer, or sometimes all of the above.  I have a recording studio in my basement.  I own dozens of musical instruments.  Guitars, basses, drum kits, keyboards, horns, accordions, slide whistles.  Hell, there is a documentary being made in which my musical endeavors and life’s work feature prominently. 

I say all of this to highlight the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find a person who’s life is more obviously centered around music, which makes it all the more strange to me that I’ve been so out of touch, emotionally and professionally, with music for the last few years. 

I have played in several bands and participated in the documentary, but I haven’t released a new album of original music since a minor acoustic EP that I recorded in a day back in December 2014.  I used to wonder if something was wrong with me if I didn’t release an album a year, at least, and I’m now coming up on six years with nothing to show for it except for the memories of some gigs played, a handful of unfinished projects and a few one-off songs or videos.  I have written and recorded things but I just haven’t been able to get into any sort of rhythm (pun intended) with my musical life.  I think that’s because I haven’t HAD a musical life.  Instead, I have been knee deep in the Miasma and it’s killed my sense of joy, wonder, and creativity.  At the same time, as a listener, I have allowed music to become a background wallpaper to my daily life instead of truly engaging with, appreciating it, eating, sleeping, and breathing it as I used to do.

The Miasma is a term I recently acquired from the book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by author Neal Stephenson.  It is the catch-all term for the cultural wasteland of insanity, trolling, confirmation bias, misinformation, distortion, propaganda, bad blood, viral marketing, and lowest common denominator garbage that the modern internet has descended into.  Everything about the public discourse, the endless doomscrolling, the sheer end of the world nihilism of late stage capitalism, authoritarianism, stupidity, violence, and (bonus!) a global pandemic, it’s all so disheartening, so maddening, that turning on a television, reading a newspaper, looking at a social media feed, or visiting nearly any part of the internet for any reason is guaranteed to make whatever mood I am in worse.  Good moods become bad moods, bad moods become dire.

Instead of using music or meditation or poetry or art or any of the other tools at my disposal to counter the effects of the Miasma, I have fallen into an engagement trap based on the fact that, at one point, I used to love the internet.  I did.  I believed in it.  I thought it was a net-positive for humanity.  In the world before the web, communities were more physically isolated, knowledge harder to access, there was much more terra incognita.  The promise of the web and the connected digital society as laid out by luminaries like Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, and even Steve Jobs was so appealing.  It was almost like a second Enlightenment Age dawning.  All the worlds knowledge available, all the communications barriers broken.  How could this be anything other than an Objectively Good Thing?

Well, as it turns out, every silver lining has a cloud.  As it turns out, people were not historically hostile and tribal merely because of limited communications technology or limited access to information.  People are hostile and tribal because they have been made that way through billions of years of natural selection.  They require almost no incentive whatsoever to pick sides and develop animosity towards each other.  Kurt Vonnegut nailed it with his granfalloon concept.  Thanks to this programming, hyper-connecting all the people was always going to mean that the people who thrive on rancor, discord, and negativity would have louder voices and more power to shape our culture than they did before.  Capitalism, which naturally goes where the market leads, would naturally find ways to monetize and stoke this hostility and division in order to make money.  Religions and political parties would do the same, feeding the flames to advance power and agendas.  These are not new forces in human society, they existed as far back as written history records and likely much further back.  It turns out that the previous limits imposed by geography, technology, and access to information were also holding some of our tribalism and collective insanity in check by channeling it into narrow and somewhat isolated outlets.  That is no longer possible.  Thanks to the democratizing power of the internet, we now have all of the foibles and ridiculousness of our species running amok, unfettered, unchecked by any force, Enlightenment 2: Electric Boogaloo has given way to Idiocracy 2: Boogaloo Now Means Race War.

But wait a minute, I hear you saying, wasn’t this post about music?  Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there, it’s my blog, I wanna take a while to get to my point, that’s my prerogative.  Keep your shirt on.

OK, so, the Miasma was probably inevitable, in retrospect, but I didn’t anticipate it.  I believed, perhaps too strongly, in the positive and empowering aspects of the always on, hyper-connected, society.  I thought it would lead me to more creativity (more ability to share what you create is good, right?), more human connection (all my old friends are here, that’s gotta be good, right?), and all the old hassles of primitive technologies would be rendered obsolete by the wireless, simple, one device to rule them all vision of the smartphone as digital camera, digital music player, GPS, movie player, social life, VR headset, internet information appliance, dessert topping, floor wax, etc.   I was an early adopter.  I was a proponent.  I was a fan. 

I was wrong.

The all-in-one device is a marvel of convenience, but it makes focused attention on any one single thing of value extremely challenging.  Always being connected is great for knowing where to find a gas station while driving in an unknown area or for settling a bet about a piece of trivia with a friend, but it creates a constant psychological drag on the real world experience of every day life because you often feel compelled to use it just because it’s there and you’re bored for 5 whole consecutive seconds.  A globally connected platform for delivering creative work to audiences is theoretically empowering for artists, but since everybody throws everything out there, nothing feels special or unique or lasting, almost everything feels ephemeral, transitive, meaningless, like a night at an open-mic where the entire audience is on-stage at once, talking at the same time. 

In the Miasma, all of these things that hypothetically could have been enriching, empowering, and inspiring have mostly turned to shit.  Devalued, corrupted, monetized, destroyed, and we as a society have been lessened to the extent where Donald Fucking Trump actually became President of the United States.  Think about that.  As far back as the 80’s that would have been the punchline to a joke about America failing as a country and IT.  ACTUALLY.  HAPPENED.

I can chart my decline in creative interest and output on a graph (yes, I’ve actually done this on paper) and it directly correlates to the rise of the post-Facebook/post-iPhone Miasma version of the internet.  My flagging interest in saying anything whatsoever to the world at large, my increasing disinterest in my OWN MUSICAL WORK, my general sense of despondency about anything, or anyone, anywhere, truly mattering at all, my ever deeper struggles with the blank page or blank tape, it all correlates perfectly to the amount of time I have spent online since the New Enlightenment turned into the Miasma. 

The question is, what is a boy to do?

The internet I fell in love with is gone, for good.  The world I grew up in is radically changed.  No use looking backwards, it is what it is. I can limit my online time, work on my mindfulness, and swear a lot, but it I can’t undo what’s been done.  This is where my job is.  This is where my friends are.  This is how the music and tech industries function.  If I want to work in technology and/or be a creative, I can’t pretend the cultural landscape is what it was 12 years ago. 

I think the answer, ironically(?), is hinted at in trends I am beginning to encounter in the habits of the generation being raised with hyper-connectivity and social networking since childhood.  They are not enamored of apps and smartthings, they don’t think they’re especially cool or interesting, and they don’t inherently think the digital stuff is better or worse than what came before it.  It’s all just tech.  This is why a lot of people these days are, apparently, rediscovering mixtapes made with actual cassettes.  I did not foresee cassettes coming back, but they are.  Why?  Making mix tapes with your own voice and choices of songs was fun when I was a kid and it’s still fun now.  Who cares that you can listen to the same songs on your phone on Spotify?  That doesn’t feel unique like a tape does.  Another example, my niece became obsessed with typewriters at age 12 despite having a smartphone and tablet.  People who didn’t experience the migration from analog to digital to networked are not inherently biased against the old tools and can even appreciate their quirks and limits but mostly they appreciate the physicality, the reality, of analog. 

The Miasma is an endless stream of mostly negative messages masquerading as news, relationships, and information which is tailored to hook you, personally, and to shape your world and your view of it.  Unconnected technology only puts out what you put into it, there is no agenda, no secret influencers.  Maybe the way to get creative again is, in part, to only use tools and technologies that don’t try to influence my behaviors. 

And while I do think that’s a part of it, the real insight I had is that the flip side of the Miasma is how it makes you, me, everybody who participates, into both influenced and influencer.  We are all trying to culturally signify our alignments, beliefs, and affiliations.  We are all posting selfies and liking posts and crafting a semi-public persona as a type of performance art.  This is not an environment that fosters or encourages actual creativity.  In fact, it’s an active impediment because it creates the illusion of creativity.

Taking a photograph and applying some funny filter to it or cobbling together a meme is an act of creation, sure, but it’s more craft than art.  It’s more like making a hand-print turkey painting than it is like writing a confessional poem.  These types of minor creative output are mostly imitative or derivative, and the primary value is amusing other people.  These are all performance, but not all art is performance.

I recently read something written by Jeff Buckley in the liner notes to the posthumously released collection of material he was working on at the time of his death “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk”.  He wrote the following about his songwriting:

There is also music I’ll make that will never-ever-ever be for sale. This is my music alone, this is my true home; from which all things are born and from which all my life will spring untainted and unworried, fully of my own body.

And this is something I have known for a very long time but I have let myself forget, the simple basic fact that you need to create first and foremost for your ears alone, for your heart alone, for your soul alone, if you want to have a home to share with others.  You can’t make that kind of art with the thoughts, feelings, opinions, or judgments of other people in mind.  You can’t be wondering if they will like you or what you have to say.  It’s not about them.  It’s the opposite of performance.  It’s self-exploration.  The more my life has become about the performances and manipulations of the Miasma, the more I’ve come to critically judge my own work and the less free I have felt to just play, explore, experiment, and enjoy the process of making music that nobody will ever hear.  I’ve been laboring under the false feeling that if I make music that I don’t think is “releasable” then I shouldn’t have bothered to make it.  When I was in high school sitting cross-legged on my bed with a four-track recorder recording ambient soundscapes about Tony Bennett or swarms of bees I wasn’t worrying about anybody hearing me or caring what I was doing…  I was having fun.

Fun.  Yes, fucking FUN.  Where is fun in 2020?  Where is joy in 2020?  Where is there joy to be found in the endless doomscroll of the Miasma or the viral marketing hellscape or the endless disgusting behavior of the bigots and fundamentalists or the constant manipulation of influencers and trends and memes and the barrage of messages and notifications and micro and macro time sinks of modern life?  I’ll tell you where it is.  Nowhere.  Missing in action.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, there is the key in all of this navel gazing.  Without fun, without joy, even the joy of painful catharsis (and yes, there is joy to be found in working through painful emotions, just think of the joy of relief when you remove a really bad splinter), what are you sharing?  What have you got other than an empty “look at me”? 

I’ve let the Miasma train me.  I’ve let it get me focused on publishing, producing, consuming and being consumed, constantly trying to drink a bottomless pool dry, and neglecting the square one of unplugging, playing, doing things just because they are interesting, making music for nobody else to hear, remembering that the bad news will still be there whether you look at it or not but that your soul won’t be if you won’t look after it.  When was the last time I just put on a record and listened to it without also being online?  When the last time I picked up a guitar and just made something up with no plan?  When was the last time I turned away from all screens, tablet, television, phone or e-reader, and just lived in the world of the actual senses? 

I am not sure.  I know that my entire life was spent in real space up to a point, and then it started digitizing, and it eventually wound up twisted around this shared online fiction we now call a culture, but the answer is not about “going back”, it’s not about “disconnecting”, it’s about remembering that the Miasma cannot provide meaning, it cannot provide true joy, but music can, real life can, and if I want to find that again, I need only remember how to play, how to write for myself and myself alone, and then to make a conscious decision to stop participating in the endless performance.

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I have been eligible to vote in American elections since the early 90’s but the first time I actually voted was in 2004.  I hadn’t previously voted because I was a member of a religion which specifically prohibited voting.  Weird, I know.  As soon as I was no longer a member of that group, I got excited about the opportunity to vote and that year I supported John Kerry in his failed bid to unseat incumbent president (and Rove/Cheney ventriloquist’s dummy) W.  It was an extremely disappointing experience that left me profoundly disturbed.  I found it very hard to understand why anybody who was even marginally conscious about anything happening in the country could ever vote for a man with the apparent IQ of a sea cucumber, but clearly I misunderestimated my fellow citizens.  It wouldn’t be the last time.

People, it turns out, are gullible, easily manipulated, unreliable, and generally bad at critical thinking.  Also, for the most part, poor judges of character.  I suppose I kinda knew this before 2004, but I was working pretty darn hard to avoid thinking about it.  I was aware that politics were a thing and people were passionate about them but I had also been taught that none of it mattered, it was all equally corrupt and bad, and the whole “political system of things” was doomed to destruction anyhow so I didn’t think I needed to worry my pretty little head about it.  And so I didn’t.

Once I started to realize that politics is simply our name for “how the human species makes group decisions instead of just killing each other” I began to realize that I was at the mercy of the collective bad decision making, poor critical thinking skills, and gullibility of my neighbors and there was no Jesus on horse with a flaming sword a-comin’ to save the day.  That was terrifying and I would like to report that it has gotten less so, but that would be a lie.  It is not less terrifying and people do not instill me with any more confidence today than they did before.  Probably less since 2016.

But here we all are and 2020 is here and the POTUS is a mob boss, the Russians and Republicans are strategic allies, every Democratic candidate on the table has a fatal flaw, and every left-leaning person I know is fighting with every other left-leaning person so we’re probably gonna get twelve more years of He Who Shall Not Be Named after he just goes ahead and declares himself president for life and suspends elections and since I am powerless to change these things, I need to figure out how to live with them and, ideally, not enter into a crippling depression.

The simplest option, perhaps the only one that really rises to the level of a solution, is just to tune out.  Go back to how I grew up.  Focus on music, family, personal development, art, and the rest, just show up to vote my conscience but, otherwise, simply ignore all the bad stuff that’s happening.  Don’t follow the news, don’t obsess over the soap opera, keep a distance.

This is much harder to do in my current life than it was when I was growing up.  I grew up in the pre-internet era when news was a paper delivered once a day which I mostly ignored, despite delivering it around the neighborhood.  I read the comics and skimmed the TV listings for movies or shows I might want to record, but beyond that I was pretty much unaware of and uninterested in the world outside my neighborhood.  No social media, no cable news, no office filled with co-workers with opinions.  It was simple.  Now, if I want to see what’s going on my friends lives, I dip into social media and pretty soon I’m seeing political posts and I’m having opinions and the bubble is gone.  I work in an office on a computer all day, the internet is always happening, and I can choose not to look but it takes a lot more self-control.  It’s easy to avoid things that you have to out of your way to see, it’s hard to avoid things that pop up on your screen or arrive in your inbox.

I’m not sure, either, that I would like to return to the ignorance is bliss stage of my life.  I wasn’t just uninformed, I was MIS-informed.  Because I wasn’t aware of actual events actually happening in the world around me, I was able to be fed a bunch of untrue information that formed the basis of the worldview promulgated by my religion and this kept me from thinking for myself for a very long time.  Long story short, I was insulated and thus slow in developing my critical thinking skills about the world even as I developed my intellectual capacities in other areas like music and computer programming.  Once you are out of a bubble, you can’t go back in.  The nature of bubbles is that they pop and then they no longer exist.

At the risk of over-simplifying then, I see three options.  Go back to being Bubble Boy, lose my damn mind over every new outrage, or, option three, balance.

Here are my fledgling rules for finding balance in a world of political insanity:

1. Don’t over-consume.  Read the news once or twice a week to stay informed on major events, but avoid binging, avoid politics talk shows, podcasts, cable news, blogs, and the obsessive 24/7 coverage.

2. Don’t fuel negative feelings, find positive things to do.  When exposed to the latest Trump outrage or Republican violation of law, morality, the constitution, and basic human decency, you can either fume and stew or put something good into the world instead.  Finish an unfinished project, write a song, listen to a new record, watch a classic film you’ve been meaning to watch, read a novel.  The world doesn’t get better without good things happening, do something positive in response to a negative.  If you let bad people and events paralyze you, the end result is less good in the world.

3. Participate, but moderately.  Vote when you get to vote.  Be informed enough to make good decisions.  Maybe even volunteer to do some canvasing, but also refrain from activities that only serve yourself.  Fighting with people online isn’t going to make any change happen.  Neither is checking out completely and staying home.  Participate in the democracy like it matters but don’t think your passion can change the world or allow yourself to become so disenchanted that the bastards win.

Informed, meaningful, participation plus just enough news intake, and a commitment to contributing my time and energy to positive things as a way to fight against the negative ones are really the three guidelines I’m going to try to stick to.  Feel free to remind me I said this next time I find myself ranting or obsessing.  I’ll appreciate the reminder even if I say, “I know but….”