There’s one in my head, and it rings with hopelessness. It sees the march of fascism, the flagrant entitlement of the world’s insipid victim mentality, and it knows the end of us is near.

There’s an external echo chamber as well, harming right and left, cutting off the ability to see any other perspective at all, let alone try to truly understand the other, which is the only method of finding resolution and peace.

I try to limit my external echo chamber. I don’t wish to be like my stepson’s friend who was heavily radicalized during the pandemic, to the point of losing a very good teaching position at an Ontario college because he bought into all the “vaccines are poison” nonsense.

Yesterday, he was posting about how a woman in Tennessee won her case and received three quarters of a million dollars for being fired for not getting one, making it sound as though a litany of similar lawsuits were about to bring the corporate world and government to their knees.

Of course, for a guy that I used to think was fairly smart, he sure didn’t much think it through. I’m not even sure he read the article he posted.

First, the woman won in deep red Tennessee. That has jack to do with Canadian law, and second, in the ruling, it specifically noted that the award was given not because the woman didn’t take the vaccine, because she’d had other vaccines, but rather, her religion opposed abortion and there were rumours (that at the time apparently had yet to be debunked) that the vaccine was made using fetus cells, and she felt, on religious grounds, she couldn’t inject that into her body.

Regardless of where I fall on the abortion issue (pro-choice), I can see why she’d be opposed to it.

It was noted in the article that the case was different than most other cases wending their way through the system, because the documentation proved without a doubt that the woman was doing it on religious grounds, not political or ideological ones. The vast majority of vaccine deniers can’t say that. All they can say is they were being selfish and stupid and would rather endanger other people’s lives than do something a liberal might support.

This was a one-off. Hardly the landslide this young man was celebrating.

It’s a weird thing to me, that prior to Trump and the Putin-pushed (and social media and mainstream media endorsed) disinformation pandemic, that perfectly intelligent, otherwise logical individuals could have gotten so locked into their echo chambers that the ability to reason, think or even want to question the information being presented to them has completely disappeared.

I understand the celebrities that do this; they’d been irrelevant before, and this buys them a fan base. It’s a grift.

But the average individual? Even the ones that had previously shown no hate in their hearts?

It’s terrifying to know how quickly someone can abdicate their own mind.

Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

Unfortunately, their willful myopia is likely to kill us all.

birds fall down upon / weighted wings they choose to fall / blindly into night

Target: 700 words
Written: 254 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Living Dead In Dallas, Charlaine Harris
Comics: Think Tank 8-11
Music: Only The Strong Survive, Bruce Springsteen