Trends of Idiocy

Trends of Idiocy

Everyone knows I see trends in social media. 

People that are separated by continents, by dozens of years. People I have known since birth. Some men, some boys, some women, some girls. I see trends between people that worship Gods, God, permaculture  and some other beings that just make old hearts pump faster.

This trend started as what I thought in myself, was a growing depression in my own psyche.

I read a post of a respected friend. They seemed to have fallen victim to the growing phenom of living in a fantasy world of half-truths and overly seasoned tidbits of “facts” fed to all of us from a blossoming family of well-financed cable news channels and an explosion of web sites.

I was depressed by the total misinformation they had posted for all to read. My next day’s post was a complete reversal of any political stance I had assumed over the last several years, ending with a submission that we should cease all resistance and surrender peacefully to the opposition and admit we had just make a big mistake.

All along I confessed, they were right.

I began to receive messages that I had “gone off the deep end” and that I was giving up.

The following day, a family member, a veteran returned from a frustrating and over extended war, was finding great difficulty in navigating through a system where he was seeking some type of assistance to attend a local college, raise a young child, and survive with the simplest of needs.

His frustration reached a point where he said that he just wanted to leave the country and find some place where he and his child could live out in a semblance of sanity, void of police randoming killing minorities, gangs wilding in the streets, politicians gaining popularity not because of their brilliance and statesmanship but because they appealed to the lowest common denominator like a Big Mac and fries. 

He was fed up. 

His social media was packed with comments from zealots claiming that the Rainbow Party was out to destroy all Christians, that Planned Parenthood was getting the bad press they deserved because God said in the bible that abortion was wrong and trading baby parts for Lamborghini’s was at least two steps beyond evil and satanic.

I don’t know if he was fed up with realizing that he had given four four years of his life in the bloody battlefield defending this crop of lunacy or if he was just ready to give up and move on.

The final stitch in the Trend Tapestry came from another son, quite independent from all of us. His contribution to social media this morning was a report of an article from the New Yorker about just how exhausting it was to continually try and explain to some around us, why so much we accept as “normal” from the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the politicians we elect and what we chose as entertainment is really a fool's parade to our own dirt nap. 

The article aptly titled:

“Many in Nation Tired of Explaining Things to Idiots “ and this just about seals the trend.

I truly think we are all getting tired.

I suspect we can only live at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for just so long before we become sickened by the sight of another gobstopper and crave a carrot or even a batch of kale salad.

I thought it was my own demise that I was witnessing. But I see now that, like others, I am tiring of the overwhelming blather that is being released on social media and think that it is the taste of bile and vitriol with every click which may end up being social media's downfall and not knowing that a person you have not seen for two dozen years had just baked brownies or their cat climbed into a shopping bag.