Today, you should invite people to your house. To meet and think. Bars may not be as good, because they are designed environments. Designed, very well, to make you relaxed and happy. Not think.
Your ancestors had to mind their manners and wipe their feet at home. There were children around. They had to keep order, and set an example.
If they wanted to talk smack, and say any damn thing, that had to be done in a tavern.
The tavern was not a designed environment.
There was no such thing as a lighting designer or a restaurant designer.
Today, it's the opposite. You go to a bar with your pals, it is a designed environment; comfortable, the lighting is just right, to make you be relaxed and happy. NOT think. The TV is on, for the same purpose.
AT HOME you can kick back, say what you want, turn the TV off. You don't have to mind your manners.
COMPLETE REVERSAL.
This is generalized powerlessness. And it isn't imaginary. A young woman whom nobody is protecting, nobody is married to, who has no present father, who has no brothers, has a lot of VERY GOOD REASONS to be afraid.
Add to that an ideology that DENIES HER FEELINGS and says she should be a big, strong woman who doesn't need a protector, and she has two problems instead of one. Her fear, and her self-critical sense she should not have her fear.
This would make anybody insane.
Only white women are made to deny the obvious. The others are allowed to be scared.
Non-whites get to complain. White women are told they can't complain.
And their mother has a new man, not their father, and after a few drinks he may shoot her an eyeball. Now she has no mother, either. She has nobody.
She's not crazy, she's under attack, but unlike in war, she has been issued no rifle.
Develop a real allergy to being in the same room or even the same house with TV news on, or the news commentary shows. This will start to affect others.
"That's not news," you can say. Then, immediately direct them to the websites that are more like news, right then. Make a list of them in advance to have handy.
A proverb says, "When you take a knife from a child, give him a piece of wood instead."
Well some people.
If there were two societies, one with excellent culture and bad science, and another one with excellent science and bad culture, which one would you want to live in?
The question answers itself.
In the first, you are tenderly taken care of, while you die because there are no antibiotics and no sterile surgery. You see nature as dangerous, and it is, but you like your friends.
In the second, you are brutalized while the guards keep track of you with motion-sensitive cameras that upload your moves to a satellite in space. You see your friends as possibly dangerous, and you barely notice nature. You don't like anything.
Eventually you are dead, both ways, but the first was a nicer life.
Culture is more important than technology.
Bad culture cannot be fixed by good technology.
Good culture does not require good technology.
Bad technology does NOT guarantee good culture. Woodstock did not work.
So what guarantees good culture? Ask grandma and grandpa.
A year ago. It all originally came from him. This one guy:
The scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down Britain.
One. Guy.
LOOK AT THIS:
"The findings of that paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, have faced growing scrutiny in recent weeks after countries that did not impose lockdown measures registered far fewer deaths than predicted by Imperial’s modelling."
He was just plain wrong. But the social wheels had started turning and nobody changed course.
Then there were all those videos of sick people and crowded clinics. They were convincing at that time.
But you don't normally get uploaded videos from that part of the world... and the streets were so clean. Not a dropped candy wrapper anywhere. People clunking down. With medics right nearby. Yelling nurses. Yelling apartment dwellers being dragged out. With cameras conveniently right there to show the world.
Yes, you have social dislocations on the screens, cancellings, banned accounts, but anybody can walk out to his neighbors' and say, how are you. If they want to wear a mask and stay a few feet away, you can still do that. Whatever places are open where you are, or just on street corners, go talk to people. The weather is getting nice.
Maybe your church or bar is open. Go. Whatever is open, don't be fussy: GO. Talk.
You have to go where they are. Wherever that is. If gathering has been made a problem, just WALK. BECOME NEIGHBORHOOD WALKER-AROUNDERS. Take a neighborly stroll and talk, even if masked and distanced.
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The lockdown cleared the streets.
Once the streets were empty, with everybody home, but businesses still not dead, the riots came. They could come precisely because the streets were empty. You cannot have that kind of rampaging with the streets full of people. Vacuums are always filled.
It was a neat progression from virus to riots.
Then it was time for mail-in ballots.
Lots of people would accept them now, who never would have before, because of the virus and the general weird feel their town had now.
Mail-in ballots changed who was president.
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It all originally came from this one guy:
The scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down Britain.
One. Guy.
LOOK AT THIS:
"The findings of that paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, have faced growing scrutiny in recent weeks after countries that did not impose lockdown measures registered far fewer deaths than predicted by Imperial’s modelling."
He was just plain wrong. But the social wheels had started turning and nobody changed course.
There were all those videos of sick people and crowded clinics. They were convincing at that time.
But you don't normally get uploaded videos from that part of the world.
Normalling should be understood to be a verb. It is not a "to be," it is a "to do." It's not, "be normal," it's "DO normal."
What you don't uphold, won't stand up out of habit, forever.
Pregnancy is normal. Pregnancy is where you came from yourself. Pregnancy is part of the human condition. Most of the women walking down any street have been pregnant already. Pregnancy is part of life.
Childbirth is going on right now this minute. Childbirth goes on all the time non-stop.
