There are few things more joyful than a child on a swing or studying the reflections of nature in an active pond. There is beauty and joy all around us. There's live music to be heard, and bustling restaunts, parks full of families watching kids play in local sporting leagues. Ice cream vendors selling treats. Neighbors enjoying a chat at a neigborhood pool as kids splash and play together.
It's all so startlingly normal. And it's wonderful. And bizarrely, it draws a stark contrast to the lived reality of immigrants and refugees in fear of the current government and hatefully targeted rhetoric adopted by the spokespeople of a major political party.
It's this weird dichotomy. Where maybe if you just ignore the news, and you don't talk to or about the people who are worried about all that, and you just accept that everything is more expensive because that's the way it goes, not because someone made an intentional decision to squeeze people tighter and create an economic stress that makes them more easily manipulated, if you can just not look at it, you could be living a pretty normal and wonderful life.
But man, my weird fascination with dystopian literature (that started in middle school with 1984) has made me super aware of the societal characteristics and political maneuvering that create those worlds.
And if someone were writing a book about how American democracy died to make way for a tyrannical government with an electorate too distracted to notice it happening, it would look like this.
But nobody listened when Tristan Harris told everyone that big tech has already taken control of the masses through their smart phones while people were worried about tyrannical governments. It just took some time for the politically motivated tyrants to connect with the Silicon Valley tech bros and take advantage of it. But here, 10 years later, we're living in the opening of a dystopic novel somebody will write after it has all fallen apart.
But hey, I'm heading to my kid's soccer game. Wanna come?
