We had retired from active discussion after a couple satisfying day-end cocktails yesterday. Our spirits were fairly good, despite the larger chaos. Management had permitted one of our projects to lurch into print, and another appeared to be gyrating through one of the sundry processes required to adapt it to a new edition.
These things take patience, after all, and nothing worth doing comes with ill-considered haste.
We are the QWERTY generation, shackled to the old arrangement of the keyboards that liberated us from elegance of silent curved ink to the sharper dramatic pounding of fingertips. There is a new generation that communicates through a sort of poking on touch-screens in abbreviated text, U No?
We don’t approve or disapprove of the change, since that is simply what we do, just like the climate. We change.
But because it is a little challenging to adapt, and because the tablets that flash digital information to us when horizontal in our beds require sharp pokes from measured typing, we don’t communicate, only absorb information.
That is why the cascade of information is so startling without the means to directly respond, and it piles up in the night. We are retired from the partisan struggle in progress at this moment in time. We are now concerned with attempting to follow the messaging streams that accompany this new form of information conflict.
First, we salute the messaging skills of those who have brought us to this peculiar moment in our history. Patience was a virtue, combined with dedicated skill in messaging. We have watched over the working lives of two generations who dutifully followed the precepts of the two before that. They applied a dedicated ideology to the capture of fundamental institutions to achieve change. It required patience and commitment, and over time it was a demonstrated success.
It even required acceptance of the overturn of the original ideology on which it was based. We aren’t going to argue any of that. All parties in that struggle have departed the stage, and new actors took up the struggle. The old notions of “Class” as the demarcation of society were demonstrated to be only partially accurate in a system which adapted to “meritocracy” as a common standard for a working society.
It took patience and dedication to overcome. And here we are in this curious time. It took three working generations of patient work to invert an old unfair system by which the melanin content, or lack of it, were the actual measures of a just society.
It took patience. That seems to be one of the things that has run its course. Last night we foolishly attempted to capture the messaging about the recent historic moment in this historic era. In the spectrum of information streams, there appear to be at least three major ones. First is a general acceptance that an individual with a rifle took an almost successful shot at a candidate for what is perhaps erroneously considered the most powerful on earth. He was shot immediately in righteous retribution.
The two accompanying streams on the spectrum of opinion were immediate and without any sort of patience. One is that the imagery was too perfect to have been anything but staged by the alleged victim, and included one direct and three attempted murders. On the other side is the now-traditional narrative that the government itself – or at least some parts of it- was responsible.
The latter narrative has been around for most of our lives about an event similar in horrific consequence. The patience of old emotion is a feature
What has brought us to this is the abandonment of patience. The strategy of capturing institutions- not just political parties, but of education and law, was a slow but inexorable process. We saw some of it begin in our college days, when the search for a suitable candidate to bridge the final chasm to end the old system.
Having finally achieved that goal, the final victory seemed at hand. And patience seems to have run out by someone. That could be a ruthless candidate, a deranged lone gunman, or a government that has lost patience with its ostensible employers.
We don’t claim to know, and a look at what information has emerged- truthful or not, and intentional or inadvertent- is beyond anything on which we have direct knowledge.
In the swelter of information, we are relatively certain about one aspect contained in the three information streams. Patience had run out by someone determine to achieve some truth revealed only to them. We have a suspicion that unless there is a return to a patient process of change accomplished with a little discussion, we will see something dramatic to bring someone’s revealed truth sooner than all of us are willing to accept.
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com