Losing touch with the ability to resonate with what is real

I recently received a provocative article by one Paul Craig Roberts, who claimed to have been a significant person in the financial media industry until he was blacklisted after he wrote complaints of us starting new wars in the Middle-East. The article got me to thinking.

Sometimes I think there is a tendency to think that, if looking into the bushes and one sees a fanged glowing eyes muzzle, a big patch of fur, and a long scaly tail, that it all belongs to the same beast, the same dragon. Yet to say there is nothing in the bushes since it is not consistent, is also likely to be a mistake. So I will just put some of my stimulated comments here, and not copy Robert's post for reference, which seemed worthy of free press but incompletely informed too.

I wonder if we in America have lost touch with the ability to resonate with what is real, true, because of our exposure to the television for so long, the long hours daily of seeing things happening far away, the cartoon worlds, the pounding by the incessant ads to which one must learn to resist. So when things of import also come in on the same channels, how are people to tell the difference? I’ve seen the same response to some of the things I have said, too, concepts I have proposed that ought to have sparked some inspiration in others to build useful things. It is like talking to a hypnotized audience who sees little but their prior “instructions” and are resisting ads. Also, life has gotten way more complex than it was a few generations ago, too; and despite how smart we are, it may be too much stuff to process adequately.

Since I have the characteristics of Asperger’s – sometimes called “high functioning autism” – I am quite familiar with being bamboozled. And of being set up to be a scapegoat. Usually only obvious in hindsight, unfortunately. So it is perhaps easier to see – from the Asperger’s hard-won experience viewpoint – that there has been – and probably still is – lots of bamboozling of the American public going on. As to who and why, am not exploring here; but I think it may have to do with some people who are merely playing life to “win” in a knee-jerk fashion, unable to evaluate what they are winning nor what they are doing to “win.” But they are real skilled at winning, and deception is merely one more tool with which to win.

I also think that the problem involves that we are no longer learning how things are built, put together, made to work, and sometimes changed to do something entirely new, all done by our own hands and understood by our minds. The keyboard has lots of advantages of speed and accuracy, but it lacks the ability to have the hands actually making analogs of the physical world being affected by ourselves. Without lots of daily practice at doing it yourself – DIY – one loses the connection with the ability to control our own reality, slaves to the boob-tube world in front of us, even when it no longer is the boob tube that we face.

Elsewhere today, I had read of a well-described parameter “customer-focused innovation,” that could be used to evaluate. I also like Roberts’ wording “high-productivity, high value-added American jobs.” These are things we need to bring back into the highlight of American life.

The item by Roberts has, in places, too much of the ring of truth in much of it. But maybe that is because I see from seven decades of experience of life, being a senior on Social Security Retirement, that the former administration was trying to quickly trash – was it because we oldsters know too much, remember too much of what it was like before, and thus are too likely to catch on, to risk having us around? Yet I agree that there looks like a very long ongoing "assassination" - to use a polite term for erasing someone - activity going on, largely using arranged "accidents," yet there is much to the "police state" he mentions that also involves much integrity and even heroism at times to protect those targets. I too seem to have escaped from just too many near-misses in the past decade or two.

Anyway, I repeat that, if looking into the bushes and one sees a fanged glowing eyes muzzle, a big patch of fur, and a long scaly tail, that there is a first tendency to think that it all belongs to the same beast, the same dragon. Yet it is also important to realize that there probably are some critters over in the bushes there, possibly doing something.