Existential Threats du Jour
Today's Special: Crying Wolf a la mode
With Donald Trump's recent domination in the polls, the journalist intelligentsia moved into full existential threat mode. This recent article by National Review's, Noah Rothman points out what Trumps opponents believe will happen if he is elected to a second term. This prospect brings great fear and trepidation to Trump's adversaries, and they correlate his possible return to the White House as a pure dictatorial maneuver. Washington Post’s editor at large Robert Kagan said as much is his recent column where he concluded we should prepare for the “inevitable” coming of the “Trump dictatorship.” The "Trump as dictator" narrative is sold as an existential threat to democracy and is intended to whip up the public to oppose his reelection. At what point do we admit that modern day existential threats are not the saddling of four horses but are merely situations some find distasteful or unappealing?
We live and operate in a world, if you believe everything you read, of endless existential threats. Climate change is an existential threat. Tame and totally survivable viruses are an existential threat. Drilling for economy boosting and lifestyle enhancing oil instead of strip mining the land for cobalt and nickel to build electric car batteries is an existential threat. And, despite the narrative that election integrity is beyond reproach, a second-term Trump presidency won fairly and democratically at the ballot box, proves the Trump is a dictator and thus is an existential threat to all humanity.
To be sure, lest one conclude that existential threats abound on every menu, here is the offering of current events that DO NOT constitute emanate threats to our very existence:
Private media companies imposing arbitrary "community standards" censorship
National debts figures exceeding annual GDP
Funding corrupt warring oligarchs in the Eurasian steppe
Uselessness liberal arts degrees and the higher education public / private grift
Ignoring "never again" and the escalating war in the Middle East
Gene altering therapeutics mandated by the world's largest governments in consort with the world's largest pharmaceutical companies
We read our morning news for convenience, consuming it as if dispensed at a drive through. "I will have the daily McThreat with a side of fears," we speak into the squawk box as we peer nostalgically into the rearview mirror. The news today is all sensational "carbs" designed to stuff us with guilt induced anxiety with no context-derived nutritional value. Worse yet, we wait in long lines to receive our daily diet of relative sensationalism and then rush to the "like" button to affirm that we are in the know - singling to the world that we are among the enlightened.
This daily pattern of how society receives its news simplifies life. Whether one is in the classroom or the boardroom, when a topic arises, like how to respond to inflation, one can respond smugly with the correct CNN, NPR or NY Times issued daily special. No historical nor biblical context is required. In this endeavor, one is fully sated from their morning refresh of existential fear and can confidently affirm the right course of action with the day's trials and tribulations.
The one thing that seems true about consumption of the daily news is that the steady fear-based diet clogs the passageways between mind and soul. Any alternative news diet that may cleanse that conduit is deemed blasphemous and must be shunned. This is why protests in the face of righteousness get positive ink. Because narrative trumps truth, images of the Union Jack flying in Trafalgar Square or the Stars and Bars in front of the US Capital receives media condemnation whereas the flags of the Ukraine and Palestine held up in those two locals receive media praise. How do I know? Our drive-through news tells me so and as weakness of thought has been matriculation into public conscious for the past 50 years, the public has no thinking avenue of recourse for these absurd events.
Consuming a daily diet of approved news and counter narratives, conspiracies and counter conspiracies, and protohistory and new-age cultism leaves the body flabby and the mind malnutritioned. Within this information cycle, the forces of evil have a hay day. The lord of deceit need not fool all the people all the time. He must merely shovel muck into the stream of truth to cloud what is right and true. Nothing plays more into the hands of lord nefarious than the proliferation of public private media entities controlling the day’s news especially when that news is fortified by colluding academic institutions providing the cover of "science" to lend credibility.
With 2024 being an election year in the US, existential threats du jour will surely multiply. Media sources will offer their daily warnings concealed by grift with a side of hyperbole. And a low-T population will buy it and “like” it hook, line and sinker.
Perhaps in 2024, we should resolve to go on a diet, to cut out the McTheats and fears and to start an exercise routine that grows and strengthens the mind. The place to start the year is with the One who does not deceive, the One who does not need to embellish His accomplishments and does not need our approving "clicks." 2024 should be a covenant year, a time reset our lives and resolve to focus on what is True. In the ensuing year we should endeavor to dust off that mindful treadmill and lift those spiritual weights until His prospective comes into plain view.
We were created for freedom and given a simple set of rules to follow. Our covenant with God begins with ourselves and the application of those Ten Commandments. Next, we must hold our leaders to account for those stated ideals. Finally, if the news we consume does not fortify our declaration that,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
it should simply be eliminated and replaced with information the strengthens our mind, body, and spirit. The metaphorical wolf that never appears offers nothing of substance, nothing of mindful value. The town cryer’s wolf is simply the fear referenced in the in infamous statement, “we have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”