SoapBox 1 - A Crisis

This post was written months ago and put aside. After my December 14 post, it's time to haul it out of the closet now.

I’m going to alert you to this kind of post by starting each title with SoapBox - your warning that the content may prove to be either controversial blather, or a cure for insomnia. These posts are only intended to allow my thoughts and questions to escape the confines of my brain and solicit argument or some confirmation that I’m not losing it. If these posts languish in the electronic cloud, so be it. But if you choose to continue to read, for reasons of boredom, curiosity, or incredulity, please feel free to comment in the space at the bottom of the post. ‘You’re way off base here, fella,”  “so what?”, or “please cease and desist,” are  examples of acceptable responses.

              


"When one reads things from the past it is difficult to bring it in perspective. Times and conditions are different. Attitudes and priorities change. What is acceptable and what is not acceptable changes and depend on the society in which you live. Things always look different as the perspective changes. I remember the history lesson about the eighty-year war in Holland, where Willem of Orange fought the Spanish to gain independence. During that war the Spanish had at some point encircled the city of Leiden. The citizens suffered and were so destitute and hungry that they even ate rats. As food became scarce and I was catching and eating rats I often had to think about that episode which had seemed so terrible. Now I found that it made good sense to eat things that are readily available while the foods, which one has been used to eating, become scarcer."

This is from a post-script my father wrote to accompany his biographical story. In the story, he shares his experiences as a child and young man in Indonesia, and as a guest of the Japanese in a WWII prisoner of war camp. He's careful to caution the reader about applying modern day attitudes and judgements to behaviors and activities of a different time and place. It got me to thinking about the attitudes and judgements I find myself making today as I process the latest newspaper article or television news entertainment show now that I have the time in retirement to contemplate. 

It must be that I'm seeing things through lenses built in the 1950's that are now out of focus in the twenty-first century. The things the media, politicians, and the judiciary seem to be focused on appear to me to be wild anecdotal extrapolations. To use a corollary from the world of statistics, they take an outlier (an observation that is well outside of the expected or normal range of values) and make it seem the norm. Often what follows is a recommendation for action to address the anomaly.

For example:

• An individual suffers some tragedy and we need to re-write the laws of society to eliminate the risk of such a thing ever happening again.
• Some deviant trespasses against an innocent, and an entire class or association affiliated with that individual (or interfering peacekeeper) is held responsible.
• A poor choice of words in an emotional moment, or a common act performed against a recently anointed sacred symbol (think lion) can lead to the modern day equivalent of a scarlet letter.
• New unwritten rules of conduct seem to be created daily, with violators shunned publicly, or worse yet, prosecuted by anonymous plantiffs.

It's as though there's no accounting for proportion, no scale, no measuring stick with which to put the event into perspective. 

One conclusion I have been developing while reflecting on the latest crisis or the latest public outrage is that what is occurring is a fundamental and rapid shift in social norms and assumptions. That shift is a source of cognitive dissonance for baby-boomers like me. Maybe we just can't calibrate our reaction to what seems to be extreme anecdotal extrapolations because our concept of the norm in any given situation is out of synch with rapidly expanding upper and lower limits (to borrow from statistical definitions). 

From my new position as senior observer and bystander, it feels like these trends are the result of agenda’s and movements intended to transfer power and wealth through means other than our current capitalist economy or political structure. And that these agenda's and movements are degenerative and corrosive in nature. Even as I write that, I get a sense that I'm slipping into a curmudgeon state of conspiratorialism (I know that's not a word - but it fits.) That's when I started wondering if it isn't that my glasses are the ones out of focus or clouded. Maybe it's my cognitive dissonance that's warping my sense of what is rational and reasonable. Is my sense of common sense no longer common?

I warned you.....