It is 4:12 PM on Tuesday, August 20th, 2024. It is a beautiful evening with a slight breeze, no fog or clouds and a cool 65 degrees.
I’ll start off in that I remain astonished at how quickly time passes and how much the world has changed. The year 2016, or even 2010 do not seem as though they should be so long ago but in the case of 2010 we’re talking 14 years already! COVID certainly caused a blur of time disrupting normal schedules and with the lockdowns we didn’t have much to differentiate one day from the next. The second big event I’d say is the spread of misinformation and the disaster that is Trump.
Misinformation on the internet is one thing but I’m aghast at how ‘news’ channels such as Fox went completely off the rails. Fox, which bills itself as ‘news’ but is really ‘angertainment,’ would seem like a more credible source than some random internet page. Yet, they have adopted the same level of lunacy as those conspiracy pages. It’s like the nonsense that originally started out as simply ‘trolling’ suddenly took on a life of its own, jumped out of the internet and integrated with Fox. Then, if that wasn’t enough we get a President as though an unholy spawn! Everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie. It is though he is nascent 4chan in a political leader.
Times certainly became weird and is something that a decade or two ago I would have said could never happen and was complete nonsense, yet it did!
It makes me wonder if there is some unseen force directing the mood of a nation or even the world. All of a sudden, in an amazing twist of fate, now have Kamala Harris and it seems the forces of good are finally beating back the darkness of Trump. Yin and Yang. Anyway, I cannot stress enough just how disappointed I am with half the population of the USA and their gullibility. Every week they exhibit a new level of idiocy from which I think they cannot go even lower and am always proven wrong. Some examples from pictures I’ve seen are Trump supporters wearing diapers, putting a tampon on their ear, wearing Trump dictator shirts and carrying cups of Vance’s seamen. These people are irredeemable.
I know I’ve written about this a lot but for those in the future reading this, I remain in a state of utter incredulity. I am aghast and feel as though this all cannot be real yet it is. Trump has formed a cult among my countrymen and is something I never thought would be possible, not in my wildest imagination.
Enough of that.
Currently I’ve been reading a lot about Rome and have just started a book on the dark ages. I’m especially interested in the rise of Christianity. What I was taught in grade school is all from the perspective of Christians. I’d like the real story and to get that I have to go back to the source and that is Rome. As I’ve said before, I believe Jesus was just another preacher among many and would probably be aghast at the religion founded in his name. The time was right for a change and it was because of Rome that the religion spread as much as it did. I’ve come to learn that change can be slow or very quick. I’m living in a time where half the population have suddenly abandoned all reason and started following a demagogue named Trump. The time was right and although the ideas had been spreading for some time (The political Tea Party) major change seemed to have come on very quickly. It was the right time for it. Perhaps religion works this way too. Suddenly people abandon thousands of years of paganism for this new religion with a new message? Unlike Trump however, the Christian message of poverty and peacefulness had staying power, the hatefulness of Trump’s message does not (I hope).
The second aspect I’m very interested in is what happened after the fall of Rome, the so-called “dark ages.” I’ve just gotten through the first two chapters and quite a lot was happening that I never knew about.
Anyway, talk about change. Here I am, in a country where half of the population (Republicans) have awful ideas and want to take the country backwards 50 years and/or perhaps to something that looks like The Handmaiden’s Tale. This is a real threat and has had me wondering what the hell is going on for some time. Then, learning more and more about Christianity, have come to the belief that it is all made up, morphing into something completely off the rails from what Jesus intended. And Jesus himself was just another preacher yet from his ideas he has changed half the world. Talk about feeling a bit out of sorts when after learning, traveling and reading you have to come to the conclusion that a large part of the people you know are living in a fantasy whether religious, political or both. In the past these subjects could stay somewhat suppressed in polite society but the Trumper’s have decided to make it their entire identity and ensure you know it with their big flags and red hats. How absurd it all is.
