Pioneers, inventors, wanderers, and people steeped in hard work helped define a nation in a previous age. Nowaday,s this has been supplanted by superficial caricatures of clowns that are themselves creations of illusions. While people are relics with little utility to a society that is possessed by fragmentary citizens honed from the trash of nostalgia and trivia.

Do not conflate nostalgia and trivia with real knowledge, as a grab bag of nonsense regarding sports, celebrities, viral videos, and video games hardly replaces literature, philosophy, science, and theology. Fashion belies the idea that someone’s external expression is somehow relevant to the advancement of our species. Yet, due to our utter lack of direction as people of the United States, we now rely on the appearance of things to wholly define one’s place in the natural order.

It is as though we’ve reversed our trajectory into the future, regressing to the age where one’s display of face paint, seashells, necklace of trophies, or types of animal skins worn proffer an adequate positioning of our standing in the social hierarchy.

Fractured media sources play into this by delivering fragments of nonsense construed as specific cultural knowledge but presenting us with superfluous trash masquerading as contemporary relevance. Do we as a society want more than that? The answer I see writ large on the foreheads of those I encounter is a resounding NO. We are seemingly happy to be lost in our trivialized compendium of all things golf, Pokemon, celebrity du jour, fad exercise, or scandal rocking the tabloids that we find trending on social or mass media.

The cliché that we are becoming a nation of idiots is played for laughs but actually applies to the vast majority – which do not realize this includes them. In my estimation (or arrogance), I believe this concerns almost 95% of those I am likely to encounter on any given day, week, or month. I move from poor to wealthy environments and rarely am able to claim to be witness to intellectual activity. Sure, I listen in on savvy investors making money, real estate deals, and people plotting their next vacation or sending their children off to university, but the underlying mindset is tone-deaf to matters of societal cohesion beyond obtuse biases that often fuel hate.

Without a working broad spectrum of knowledge and little logic backed by critical thinking, my fellow citizens wreak of posturing imbeciles while whatever hope I’ve had of finding inspiration and mentorship from those around me has faded like the sun over Seattle in January. How does one find community in a society of idiots when the ambitions of the individual are met with indifference to big-picture issues and sharing well-reasoned wisdom doesn’t exist? Instead of being embraced in the community, we are labeled nerds and geeks to be relegated to the margin as difficult while being perceived as awkward and or anti-social.

Somewhere along the road of advancement in the United States, knowledge became a weapon characterized by showing off and appearing arrogant. The economic reality of capitalism requires rewarding of smart, but it should happen off-camera on the margin and in the shadows. Should great success come your way, the scrutiny of who you are and the hope for your demise will run rife in our population of misfits who thrive on seeing others ultimately suffer worse fates than they perceive themselves to be suffering.

Somewhere in the back of my head, maybe in the front, sit Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Baudelaire, Bukowski, Burroughs, Dickens, Ram Dass, Russell, Dawkins, Deutsch, E.O. Wilson, Fortey, Foucault, Reich, Canetti, Marcuse, and Bataille. They inform my search for a voice.

500,000 years ago, we started making stone tools; 30,000 years ago, we learned to work with clay; 12,000 years ago, we learned how to farm; 10,0000 years ago, we learned to work with copper; and 6,000 years ago, we learned how to work with bronze. Today, we are reduced to social media and empty posturing so that a new religion called consumption and conspicuous display can rule over us. The digital tools we are using are the new religious icons that adorn our minds, occupying them with thoughts of our electronic Jesus, Buddha, etc.

We stand on the knife’s edge before the maw of the beast, its fangs bared, our future uncertain. After thousands, tens of thousands of years of evolving survival skills combined with cultural and scientific advancements, we are led by frightened greedy men drunk on treasure, fearful of one another, and ready to do battle with demons of extradimensional ferocity. Yet, it is only us standing on the horizon, alone with our existential angst and personal neglect of a personal healthy ecosystem of mind, that rages before humanity.

Without wandering hordes of enemies, without wild beasties ready to spring from the night to seize our throats in their jaws, we empower our fellow men to reign with deadly force and allow the madness of unchecked individuals to harness chaos among us to ensure we must live in uncertainty believing horror is just ahead. As we attempt to progress, it is our destruction of the resources of our planet, the potential for profound and abrupt cessation of lives due to mass illness, or political dogma painted in zealotry doing the bidding of jingoistic narcissists that trace back to the most privileged enjoying the high altitude life that survives atop the feeding chain of the haves and the have-nots.

Knowledge and wisdom from our elders were erased over the past century, and rightfully so, as we intentionally dumbed down our populations so that only a small cadre of sadistic opportunists could share power among themselves. We as individuals no longer know how to govern ourselves, our ability to voice our minds without resorting to violence or equally stupid rhetoric has been placed on the sideline, and thoughts of the future have been replaced with hope for survival in a world that if it was managed by wisdom would have few enemies other than those of our own making.

A solution will not be easily had as wealth and power are cowardly fellows and fully understand what could be lost if an angry, undereducated mob was unleashed with the knowledge that they are but frightened tools manufactured by the powers that be who once believed that a stupid society is a passive controllable mass of consumption, profit, and warfare that remains ripe for exploitation while ignorant of what they’ve sacrificed by not investing in themselves.

Roe v. Wade was overturned today because conservative religious zealots have penetrated the Supreme Court. As a consequence, sunlight over America is fading while the blood of women will pour out.

The news about fuel costs, the endless lament, a conversation of extraordinary whining regarding the insane expense of filling a tank, this nonsense must stop because who really cares?

When gas costs $3.50 a gallon (such as back during this past January), the natives rest easy, but at $5.40 a gallon (current price as of today in Arizona), we have a national emergency. Give me a break. How can this panic be real when reality says this is NOTHING unless one considers it a distraction? The average roundtrip to and from work in the United States appears to be about 41 miles per day. The average fuel economy across America right now is a hair under 25 miles per gallon.

Using those numbers requires 1.64 gallons of gasoline for the daily commute. So, back in January, it cost approximately $5.75 to get to and from work, while today, it now costs $8.86 or $3.10 more per day than it did back at the beginning of the year.

By land area, Phoenix, Arizona, is the 6th largest city in the continental United States. A ridiculous commute from the north edge of the Phoenix area in Carefree south to the border of the Gila River Indian Reservation in south Chandler would amount to 43 miles in each direction or 86 miles roundtrip. For this long haul, you’d be spending $18.58 per day with gas at $5.40 per gallon unless you drove my 2019 Kia Niro hybrid, in which case it would be a $9.29 outlay.

My point is that very few people can lay claim to 100-mile-per-day commutes, even here in America’s 6th largest city, and if they are doing that using some large pickup truck, that’s an error in judgment, and besides, only 15% of pickups are used for work so please don’t toss that red herring at me.

For those who earn on the low end of the pay scale, sure, this hurts them, but not as much as higher rents do, and NOBODY is talking about that.

So let’s venture into the low-pay situation; someone I know works about 9 miles away from the coffee shop she works at. Her 2001 Jeep Cherokee, on a good day, gets 17 miles per gallon; so back in January, she was spending $3.50 to get to and from work, while today it’s approaching $5.50, and there are those who are trying to argue that this extra $2.00 is the straw that is breaking the camel’s back. If she works 22 days per month, she’s incurring an extra expense of $44 due to today’s cost of gas, but her rent increased by $300 a month, just as ours did. Yet the government has the audacity to call for a gas tax holiday that only adds $0.18 per gallon., I wonder what someone like this woman would do with the extra $5.40 per month she’d be saving? Oh, I know, she’d apply it to her rent.

The 2022 median wage in America is $16.50 per hour or $13.90 after tax. The national median price for a one-bedroom apartment was $1,216 back in 2019, meaning someone needed to earn $21 an hour back then to afford a small apartment, but instead of discussing wage inequality, we blame greedy oil companies and lay fault at the gas pump as being the boogyman ruining our ability to afford life. What a sham.

I suppose to live vicariously is better than having never lived at all. In a world that favors the haves over the have-nots, the need to be witness to something “real” fills in for the instinct to participate. One needn’t hunt and kill their next meal; to kill an enemy is only allowed when sanctioned by the state, justice is not administered by the crowd but by the court, we mustn’t build our own home, and there’s no certainty a spouse will be found.

So, we passively watch the life we are not living. We watch the superman take out a gang single-handedly, the underdog is portrayed as overcoming adversity to win the day, and against the odds, the hero gets the girl. Compliment the fantasy on the big screen by encouraging the citizens to take things into their own hands while practicing fighting, driving, collecting treasure, and maneuvering through impossible scenarios so they might win and be heroes themselves. If you love fishing, there’s a tv show for that, hunting big game, a show for that too. Do you suffer from depression, witness someone else’s that’s worse than your own, and maybe you find solace that your life might not be all that bad?

Don’t like where you live? Maybe a war somewhere else will convince you that your existence is pretty good. After all, we can’t all go to the lake, mountain trail, Disneyland, Central Park, Paris, or scuba diving off Key West. But then again, we can’t let the natives become restless because we have no real idea where the boiling-over point of humanity lies. What pacifies the horde so the wealthy are allowed to enjoy the spoils of their war against those in poverty? If only the impoverished could easily be placated to accept their station in life. Just where can the balance be found between self-incarceration and minimal amounts of participation?

I’m going off-track as I came to this page after having watched a couple of dozen clips from Jack Reacher, John Wick, and The Equalizer. Obviously, I’m broken as I want to fail to understand the appeal, or maybe I don’t have a choice but to fail, as the idea of a solo Johnny Badass cleaning house to show the bad guy what it is to suffer for violating the honor of men. This primitive idea that a man’s rage, when employed for the greater honor, will propel our abilities to overcome evil; give me a break. At best, this is pandering to man’s primitive lizard brain; at worst, it drives home the ambiguities of having un-intentional, near, purposeless lives in the age of meaningless social media.

When knowledge exists in the forbidden vacuum occupied by the despised, those intellectuals, nerds, coders, scientists, engineers, professors, creators, and rarely controllers, these are then the class of people able to give context to their experiences which might take them into the corners of the Arctic, the Balkans, glaciated mountain trekking, Amazon river adventures, visits to museums, operas, and other places of sophisticated immersions. On the other hand, the vast void of ignorance holds appeal to those who needn’t lend meaning beyond the visceral, and yet, they travel with resentment that others might take more from their position of privilege while the masses feign indifference or discontent.

This then begs the question for me: where is the messaging about the importance of vast knowledge beyond the absolutely superficial surrounding manufactured drama that accompanies professional sports, television series, the antics of celebrity-based governance, vapid personalities that hawk indulgence, and finding completeness through consumption?

I can easily understand that I sound like the idiot thinking liberation from the yoke of banality can be found in intellectualism, but that would be a misunderstanding as what I mean to insinuate is that authenticity and curiosity are the missing elements that pull us forward in ways that are healthy for society.

Today, I’m asking, “Where is a place?” because a place that was once one thing has changed to become something else. There’s the fast and easy answer that says nothing has changed other than the observer, but that’s only part of the story. A crass example might be found in two plots of land found in Oświęcim and another in nearby Brzezinka, both found in Poland. Back during World War I, a migrant worker camp was built in Oświęcim. After that war, Polish soldiers took over the facility. Prior to this, I’d imagine the area was farmland, but I cannot find definitive information to confirm that. Regarding the other location, meaning Brzezinka, it apparently was wide open just before development activities got underway.

Starting in 1940, the army barracks and, subsequently, the large plot of nearby land were being repurposed. Up to this point in history, these places were of no significance at all, but that changed as Oświęcim, infamously known as Auschwitz, and Brzezinka, better known as Birkenau, became two of the most notorious concentration camps. During their years of being operated as extermination camps, approximately 1.1 million people lost their lives there. Following World War II, the camps became memorials.

As memorials, these sites have become solemn grounds that remind humanity of the atrocities people are able to commit against one another. My point is that places start out as ordinary, yet if extraordinary events transpire, they can end up inscribed in cultural memories with significance that transcends the easily forgettable.

I know that this is a heavy-handed example where readers might say that nothing should be compared to such things and that I risk sliding towards the sacrilegious, but in my opinion, places hold memories, and while it is our collective knowledge that imbues a place with such notable attributes, they do exist.

Well, this was a long-winded (I’m well known for such things) way of getting to the main gist of my post, “Where is a place?” I’m currently at a place where I find the memory of what it was to have greater meaning to me than what I perceive the location to have now. I do understand that my own trajectory is constantly moving, but I am not the change I register as I sit here writing, observing, and contemplating. The differences are arriving with others who have started considering this place as one they could consider frequenting. The place is being repurposed.

Similarly, America as a place and an idea are mutable with a plasticity that, while still pliable, could at any time calcify and appear destined to collapse due to a rigidity that steals its flexibility. Back to my ugly references to concentration camps and the prisoners whose lives ended in Oświęcim, Brzezinka, or Treblinka, those who arrived in the four-year period of mass extermination saw their limited time in a camp as the horizon looking at the end of their existence. A killing system had an infinite grasp and could never change in the eyes of those destined to die there. Similarly, in pre-Soviet czarist Russia, an empire ruled for nearly 400 years before Lenin and Stalin brought the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to be a force of control for almost 70 years before calcification crumbled its bones and wrought change. All systems appear to fail when change is lost to sclerotic stagnation.

Change is the operative word here today. Places change, and we change, but if we fail to transform ourselves and places do not change, we begin to normalize a docility that demands things stay the way they always were. The brilliance of America since its founding has been this endless metamorphosis that allowed us to adapt to the needs of the day, but today, we are seeing a pandering to base natures where those who abhor change want to pass on stability to strong men who offer promises of today being similar to the day, week, month, and years before when a place and your sense in it was known and familiar. This line of thinking negates ideas of change and, if not rooted out, risks dragging people into the inevitable convulsion that must catapult stagnation out of the doldrums.

The effort to break free of the crippling gravity found in the total loss of movement is akin to the rocket lifting a multi-ton payload into the heavens; all hell must break loose. The violence of the sort that tears apart what it is leaving behind is the revolution that upends those who brought malaise and are about to be murdered before their very eyes. War is then the inevitable outcome that must arrive to wash away the fear of change. Are we headed into that war?

I hope we are not moving towards conflagration as I surely do love the place I inhabit in my life at this time and feel loathe to change that, though I do enjoy my inner conflict that remains in a near-constant state of battle.

Our motto for the next decade could read, “Fighting an internal war against complacency for personal freedom.”