Narcoma

It is interesting that Belmont Club (Wretched) begins his article "Demon with the glass hand" referring to the stock devices of fiction and ends with the opening from Outer Limits and the finality "Reality has intruded on long slow dream of the last years of the twentieth century. And the monsters are real. "

It isn't a slow dream. It has been a trip to the movies and the narcoma induced by an excess of entertainment, living vicariously while interacting with other humans only sporadically, and living in the dark in an alternate reality. It has been showtime with lights dimmed and the abruptness of the lights comes as a shocker to most. It shouldn't.

Most people are willing to confront the evils of our time and hopeful of solving the problems. Look at the hundreds of millions donated to charity annually, the growth in annual gift giving, the hundreds, if not thousands, of competing organizations self-advertised as seeking a cure for every ailment, every complaint, every imagined ailment. Poverty, homelessness, animals, you name it, there's an organization with pity pictures and good publicists and the name of every media outlet in their rolodex. They do not walk away empty handed. Neither do they provide solutions. It's the pretense of actually doing something, this giving of money in lieu of asking tough questions. It has been an act of faith to trust these groups to provide answers and solutions.

Ultimately, the responsibility for having ignored the cancerous growth of terrorism, of genocide, of dysfunctional societies, of the proliferation of nuclear weapons, or the murderous possibilities of Islamofascism is not on the individual or our choices. Our responses were based on the options we had and the information we were provided. We played our roles too well as trusting observers, carefully sidelined to the audience of a greater play for power by people who only too well did know better.

It isn't as if our elite media is deluded about world events. They are active crafters in the role they script for us, of the information they parcel out. Since the 60s, there has been a deliberate distortion of world events that makes it difficult to judge what is happening, a combination of disinformation and non-information that makes consensus impossible, that makes doing anything fraught with uncertainty. Couple that with the systematic assault on our institutions, religion, and common sense and every resource that would serve to provide us with the moral certainty to act with intention, and the result is not apathy, but burnout. This breakdown is being corrected as the Age of Information shifts from the elite media to the interested citizen.

Western governments are no more reluctant than anyone else to be involved with something that has no material impact on them. If that was so we would not spend hundreds of million to provide relief worldwide for every flood, hurricane, typhoon, earthquake, drought, or any other natural disaster. Why does anyone assume we would do less for the political disasters of our time? Are people less victims because the U.N. and the Clinton administration, (not without help from the career State Department mandarins) abandoned them in Rwanda? Or was the public simply uninformed of the extent of the disaster? Ask most Americans where Rwanda is and I doubt Canadians would score higher. Most don't know. Most don't know about the 800,000 million dead in less than three months or, if they have read the figure, suspect the truth in absence of validation by elite media. It's a non-story in the media, once raised and conveniently filed away under "Do not follow up." Faced with uncertainty, the audience suspects disinformation. However, thanks to an elite media campaign, they know all about Kosovo, despite the fact that it increasingly appears that no genocide took place there.

The movie is over, the lights are on and the popcorn gone, so the burning question is, will there be a sudden awareness of the all too real monsters in the world or will Americans buy another ticket to another matinee?