I’m apathetic these days.  The entire world, it seems, is gaslighting each other into believing in the very worst in humanity.  We seem to be on the precipice of something but what that is, I do not know.  Sensationalism and a clear binary partitioning of the masses have trumped discourse and have negated a desire to find common ground between any two individuals that surely have some worth outside of the fire and brimstone sociopolitical climate.  It’s sickening to the point that I no longer feel sick thinking about it.  I sit back as an observer, wondering whether the madness will end before I am no longer able to observe.

There is both infinite noise and infinite silence, and this seems to be by design.  The most basic building block of change, free speech, is championed and abhorred simultaneously.  It all depends on where one resides on the hyperpartisan hyperplane of reality.  Like a giant multi-dimensional donut, the center is nowhere to be found, intentionally and purposefully cut out.  In the meantime, the ebb and flow of what rights are actually granted to the “free” mass tear us apart and leave us wondering where our comforts, beliefs, and livelihoods will reside in the future.  It doesn’t have to be this way.

We need to be selectively mute and vocalize only after we have sought to understand.  I do not believe that people are inherently one with madness, so I believe that most have something to say that is constructive.  Even the most radical of beliefs – the outer fringes of the hyperplane discussed earlier – can be born of grievances that can be conceptualized and understood.  This world should not be viewed as zero-sum.  It is possible that all can win, and the only winning scenario left – having progressed past the realm of the reasonable, into the realm of the fantastical – is to seek commonality in a desire to address common problems.  The individual’s win-condition is inherently a global loss-condition, so we must vaporize identity politics and focus on the only identity left that matters: our shared humanity.