I was born during the Cold War, but just as I was becoming aware of the wider world around me, the Soviet Union was already collapsing. My youth during the 1990s was, at least for my part of the USA, a period of relative peace. However, my entire adult life has been in the shadow of yellow journalism, jingoistic propaganda, political posturing, foreign war, and an escalating domestic police state.
Every secular authority has betrayed the trust I was taught it deserved, and most religious authorities as well. While I don't have direct memories of the Waco siege or Ruby Ridge standoff, I do recall news of the Oklahoma City bombing. We didn't have cable TV, and my family didn't tend to watch the news for anything more than the weather forecast though, so real study of events came long after the fact, and it calls into question many of the assertions made by the government and news media in each case. Much more recently, the people who claimed Kyle Rittenhouse was a racist murderer regardless of evidence now want me to believe Putin is the new Hitler. Unlike Rittenhouse, Putin is undeniably a bad guy, but they have lied so often and for so long that I can't entirely believe their narrative now.
Seeking alternative news sources opens the door to better reporting, but also a morass of utter nonsense masquerading as The Truth. Any hole in the official story will be seized as an opportunity to wedge in pet theories about secret societies, Jewish banker conspiracies, European royal bloodlines, and more. There may be a grain of truth in some of these theories for some of these situations, but often not as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, questioning anything official means accusations ranging from insanity to open treason. Meanwhile, social media now censors wrongthink and squelches unapproved discourse.
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The MAGA crowd is half-right: Joe Biden is illegitimate. The office of the presidency itself is illegitimate, though. Reinstating Il Douche (or installing anyone else) will not fix the root problem, and democracy is a false god promising counterfeit salvation. With another midterm election looming, everyone is supposed to yet again flock to the polls where for one night they have the wisdom to choose rulers who will then claim we aren't allowed to think for ourselves due to rampant public foolishness for another two years.
In the financial world, my generation is suffering from a ballooning national debt, ballooning housing prices, ballooning energy costs, and ballooning bureaucracy around anything we may want to do. Used cars a year old are often selling for more than their sticker price, when historically this was when depreciation hit hardest. But no, this can't be because Trump and Biden and congress have been on a spending spree while inflating the money supply at unprecedented rates. No, it's because Bad Russian Man attacked Ukraine. History began last week. Don't look any deeper than populist tweets and news sound bites.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not all doom-and-gloom all the time, and I have been making an effort to find joy and satisfaction with the things that are within my Socratic sphere of control, but the pressures from matters beyond my control do affect me, and I wish more people would join me in reconsidering preconceptions and examining the narratives we were told. I don't expect to persuade the world, but I want to encourage the people who care. Not everyone is willing to walk the broad road to destruction. Some of us seek the narrow way. We reject the false prophets and empty promises.
Theologically, Christians should know our kingdom is not of this world. Political vanity is chasing the very temptations Christ rejected in the desert. Daniel was saved from the lions, but many others have been martyred for standing against the system. "Freedom isn't free," say the people who demand our subservience to their god, the State. I don't have a solution to any of the problems we face in this struggle, but I want to encourage any readers who feel any resonance with this scatterbrained rant to remain strong in their convictions, and pursue truth without fear. Dissatisfaction with the world should be encouragement to look beyond the falsehoods we have been fed.
