The new abnormal

It's interesting how people vehemently refuse to read something in total; will not listen to a reasonable viewpoint and will do everything they can to insult, belittle and try to publicly humiliate you - even after you present facts in a calm, non-malicious manner and are engaging with others on difficult/trying/touchy subjects.

No one can engage because people will selectively parse and re/mis-interpret things for their own skewered purposes.  It's shameful.  It's one thing for me to excoriate "millennials", since they don't have a complete world-view or a sense of perspective.  Hell, they notoriously blow off history.  But when it's people who are in the age-range of myself, that's quite another story.  This is where the "new infantilism" sets in.  Idiots - some of whom I once gladly considered "friends" will say really stupid shit ("this is what Joe Strummer trained you for"...  what the fuck?) and go after you with knives drawn after they've delivered - what seems to be, more often than not - meticulously memorized "talking points", slogans, cliches and fragments of some socio-political mis-information which they've accepted as the gospel truth.  The news media has tapped into this intellectual void and have done no end of damage by getting people to lap up their force-fed agendas, wholesale, with spectacular ratings - this applies to outlets on both the left and right.  Now the game is:  you have to fall into lock-step with a certain pattern of thought - politically and socially - you're not to challenge, question or disagree with these edicts and you must show passion and rage or you don't have a soul (apparently).

Facebook is THE Petri dish to breed asshole-ism exponentially.  BUT...  I'm learning - quite successfully, I might add/think - to fob it off and not engage.  As it is, the attention span of most individuals now has dwindled to nil.  And you can bet that as soon as one wave of "moral outrage" is over, they'll be back to deep discussion about the Kardashians and the usual bullshit that people have more of a vested interest in.  Once the handwringing and "I can't stop crying" and "truth!" dwindles away, it's business as usual.  "Moral indignation" (which translates to "virtue signaling") equals self-righteous bombast and empty pomposity.

Here's a cold fact and an important one:  we are all most concerned with our own lives.  We have to be.  We have to be conscious of our finances; our livelihoods; our families, our homes - the things that keep us functioning day-to-day.  We're in a very dark period, historically, with people losing their jobs, their houses and their lives - in part, thanks to a pandemic no one kept an eye on.  So we have to care about ourselves before we can care about others.  That's not selfish and it's not non-empathetic (a over-used and now meaninglessly trite cliche).  It's reasonable logic.  And the only way to get through ludicrousness or serious crises in our lives/our orbits, is to be logical, thoughtful and rational.

And there's a raging scarcity of rationality out there, which is what makes it a such a frightening world at this time.  Never mind the constant regurgitation of unsubstantiated opinions being taken as fact - "frightening" starts to translate as "dangerous" - when the fallacy is seen as reality.