An unfamiliar world

A dream?

I awoke in a daze my friend, still partially submerged in the subconscious realm, thinking that the nightmare was true, until full consciousness kicked in. Thank God, it was just a dream! Can you imagine?

Everyone was walking around wearing masks and shields. The Sears store became a mass vaccination center! Had to sit there 15 minutes after the shot, with many others, in case the vaccine made any of us stop breathing. There was no choice in the matter, as this contagion, called Covid-19, was killing millions all over the planet. So, you either took your chances with a hastily created vaccine, or lived in fear of catching the Covid and dying an ugly death, and you would eventually. Yeah, not a choice really, unless you had a death wish.

And this vaccine was no one shot deal. You had to go back for a second one, to get more protection, maybe a third one later on, and so on. This invisible Covid was like a demon, it kept changing and mutating, finding new ways to sneak up on us, get at us. Glad it was only a dream!

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The validation game

In the era of social media, we are packed together like a billion sardines competing for visibility and validation. There is little space to individually define and express ourselves, without a mob of discontents taking notice and attempting to modify what we want to believe about ourselves and our world.

To be yourself, often comes at the “imagined” expense of how others define or think of themselves, and so these “others” fight back to regain or preserve what they think is being lost or threatened by your existence, including their cherished delusions and comfortable lies. Merely expressing your opinion, will cause “some” virtual strangers to fear being invalidated as to their own opinions and beliefs, and so they will employ any means possible to invalidate you first, or worse.

Dad’s cloud

The local townsfolk call it Old Albert’s Place, located on the north side of the crater, near the bunkers, a few miles off of Route 18. “Can’t miss it,” they tell me with raised eyebrows. “Just follow the dirt road to the end. It is still passable, despite the winter rains last year. Watch out for the potholes and radioactive stuff. Good luck, mister!”

And so I walk…

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Inherent immorality

Is there a primal place within us that is intentionally designed to be perpetually immoral?

Inherent immorality – The perpetually dark aspects of our human nature that we refuse to fully acknowledge, and that cause ongoing disturbances within our personal lives and throughout our societies. We’ve individually and collectively disavowed these aspects of ourselves through various psychological and sociological strategies, setting up an ongoing confrontation between our idealized versions of ourselves and the full reality of our human nature, which continues to operate in whole, despite our attempts to disown aspects of it.

Ambiguous immorality

Immoral has become a watered-down, inconsistently used version of a word that once evoked feelings of fear, shame, and guilt in our religious and social communities. There is no longer a collective consensus as to what it means to be immoral. Just about anything that conflicts with a person’s idea of good behavior, is often referred to or thought of as immoral, without any real understanding of what this word originally referred to. Google “immoral,” and you will see what I mean. Anything from voting for Donald Trump to watching the Superbowl is being referred to as immoral, and this also includes gay marriage, welfare, profanity, genetic engineering, sex education, lying to save your life, closing schools for Jewish holidays, and hundreds of other examples that span a wide spectrum of beliefs.

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