The More Things Change

 

It might be the darkening days. Or maybe it’s the cool air wafting in from the formerly frozen north reminding us that nothing is permanent. Not even us.

Yikes, ok. Especially us.

I’ve outlived enough generations now to know that a childhood spent cowering under school desks against a nuclear bomb attack is not the same as a childhood spent cowering under the blue-light unreality of Tik Tok.

However terrifying and trauma-inducing those two experiences are, we are not the same animals. The animal has changed stripes.

Here’s one example. I am shocked and embarrassed for young women I see setting up their phones and prancing around for selfie videos.  Seriously? I would slink out of the ladies’ room if someone caught me primping, ashamed someone would think that I thought my appearance warranted a second thought when the world is burning.

Here’s the news flash: the world is always burning.  Always has been. These kids got the memo. Die young, stay pretty. BE pretty. Even if you use filters to achieve prettiness, it doesn’t matter. It’s what’s on the screen that’s real.

Currently, there are 45 armed conflicts in the world, not just the two that are receiving all the outraged press in the USA. (Thank you Lucian Truscott III for pointing that out in a recent article in Salon).  Atrocities that we animals are visiting on one another are being recorded and passed around. War porn. The side that records the most “thumbs up” videos wins in the international court of Tik Tok.

Americans understand the power of TT and are using it to establish our moral superiority and invincibility. Our prettiness is intact. The last twenty years, the federal government forbade the media to run pictures of flag-covered caskets of our soldiers returning home, as if to make it not so. Schools are banning the teaching of our violent history to make it not so.  It’ll take 100 years for some newer model human animal to discover what we are now in the process of forgetting. Or maybe the task will fall to AI.

Look at all the shit we already forgot. When the news of Henry Kissinger’s death was reported, I would have found it amusing if it didn’t show how stupid people can be, that we forgot how the US murderously meddles in other countries affairs if it is in our economic interest.

Excuse me, that’s wrong. If it’s in the economic interest of billionaire investors in those countries. Another issue, for another time. 

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. That discussion fell off the agenda as quickly as it was put up there.  As if, whew! Kissinger’s dead, so we’re not doing THAT anymore. As if we ever stopped. Because we now do it under the cloak of shell corporations where Tik Tok dares not shine a light. There’s no filter strong enough to camouflage what goes on under THAT cloak.

I keep wondering when the fall-out from those dealings will reveal itself.

In that sense, we haven’t changed. We’re still cowering under our desks, waiting for the bomb to drop.