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Mary Wildfire's avatar

This other comment is just bitching, really, spurred by something you said here. I was born at the end of '55, and my family were the only ones in our neighborhood without a TV. My mother refused to get one, until I was 12. I thanked her many times for this (not when I was a kid, but later). Likewise I refused to allow a TV into the home my kids grew up in, and they have thanked me for that. But now--my son has two kids, aged 6 and 3, and they have a TV, and each kid has a tablet. When I visit, they spend a fair amount of time tuned into inane little stories, with songs usually. The fake-child's-voice grates on me, and I mind very much that the kid culture of yesterday has been replaced by this commercial culture manufactured by adults. I don't object to the lessons imparted, but the fact that it's all imposed by adults, faceless adults who do it for a living. And this is what takes up quite a bit of today's kids' time. Add in that most kids even of my kids' generation had their time fully scripted by their parents, and that adults are spending an enormous percentage of their free time in artificial worlds or checking their phones every few minutes, and I think we see a part of the reason there has been no revolt--people aren't fully clear on the difference between THIS world, the only real world, and their various fantasy gaming worlds, and we've been led into competing identity-clusters, pumped up with emotion around us-good/them-bad, and it blocks any chance of the 99% working together to force change.

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Mary Wildfire's avatar

I question two of your theses. One, that ALL of us have a deep, intense longing for belonging. I think most of us do, and I agree that it's inchoate, that people don't recognize what they're feeling and it manifests in various, often destructive ways. But I think it's possible that sociopaths, who have inordinate power in the current society, may not have this need.

Secondly, the notion that we will shortly have a massive eruption of either heaven or hell, either we'll finally get it together to move as one out of the illusions that have us competing instead of cooperating, or we'll have a horrible fascist dystopia...that sounds like what I said for years and years, until I finally saw that IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. Things always continue getting both better and worse. I'm attracted to the binary, fork-in-the-road scenario but that doesn't make it real. The possibilities are there for an enormous variety of trajectories for humanity's path into the future. We can't predict it. We can reject some scenarios as implausible, but what WILL happen and when we can't predict. Caitlin Johnstone says people are waking up and getting enlightened. I sure don't see that--if anything I see less wisdom.

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