A total eclipse of the smart

Sylvia Shawcross

We had our small respite from things as they are, languishing as we all mostly were here in the gloom of the moon as it traversed the sun. For a small few minutes we were insignificant, mere pinpricks of importance on the face of a planet in this immeasurable cosmos.

Our small worlds rendered foolish in the vastness.

We can be, if nothing else, grateful to science for understanding and predicting the eclipse and perhaps religion and folklore for its explanations because it must have been quite a ruckus for primitive tribes once upon a time. The not understanding drives us humans to understanding and explanation. Some of us. We don’t want the unpredictable.

We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.

As if normal existed now.

It is a distance too far to bridge almost now… the path to normal. We are watching a changing world. To see it from both sides right now is an experience. The far left is convinced that the far right are totalitarianisms and the far right is utterly convinced that the far left are. It boggles the mind some days. How can both be true? But they can be. It is perhaps in this that we can find the long sought end to divisiveness among us all: Totalitarianism is totalitarianism. Both sides can agree. It is what it is, no matter what it is labelled.

Totalitarianism shifts its shadow over the light of all we humans have fought for throughout history: the right to freedom of a society and the individual and peace and the pursuit, albeit difficult sometimes, of happiness. But then there are those who live in a mechanized world where there is a black and white answer to everything and all things need to be controlled so that a prescribed outcome will happen.

Predictability is all they want and they can only achieve it through a kind of worship of power and a kind of blind obedience to a vision of a utopian future. For these groups, there are no greys nor discussion nor other options.

So many of the things the new ideologues want could never be achieved in a free democratic world and so that has to change. They can do it from the left or they can do it from the right but it is almost inevitable the way things are going. And when these things happen, people change. People change. Sometimes, most times, not for the better. The shadows drift at the edge of lives down through the generations. The broken hope. The famished trust. The bewildered pain. The misplaced anger. The children of the world’s history of atrocities will never feel safety again.

How many generations it will take to replace the fear is anybody’s guess. We still see 2,000 year old fear as if it were yesterday in the world today. It rages on the streets and fuels wars and shatters hope. We have not lived long enough perhaps. I do not know.

There are those who would suggest that we are not suffering here in the western worlds as others have and do. We, in our privilege are just whining at sacrifice. We do not walk 10 miles for water or starve or live with bombs and terror. Well, not yet anyway to any extent. We live instead more so, a kind of awful pain—the loss of innocence. The loss of naïveté. And with it the great burden of the loss of strivings of generations of humans who wanted what we almost achieved for the most part: freedom, democracy, respect, safety, privacy, trust. For any one in any country in all the world, it is all we would want. All we would strive for. Never perfect but moving ever forward.

It is a tremendous loss for us all. For those who sought to escape to what we were building and to those who experienced it. It is quite profound. It was our evolving legacy to the world. But losing it we are. We, the commoners. Not the leaders and their actions. For the ideologues know what they want—their benevolent utopia. And the people who are going against it are not whining about hardships as much as they are grieving what they held dear. For the hope of the world.

We, the people did not wage the wars nor exploit the poor nor ignore the inequities. We were simply living our lives with goodwill for the most part. We did not understand how betrayed we would be and have been. That was our naïveté. But perhaps, knowing that totalitarianism is something we could all experience (beyond the orchestrators who live so far above the fray) we could know how to respond differently this time. Maybe. We live in hope and try not to die in despair. And if we need a place to begin we need to recognize it.

I do not know what your leaders are saying but here in Canada I will quote our Prime Minister in an interview in Calgary this April in response to, among other things, the crippling 23% carbon tax:

There are so many exciting opportunities for people who are thinking about the future and I think the federal government’s role is to encourage people and incentivize people to think about the future and yes, make it more expensive for people who ‘don’t’ want to think about the future and ‘don’t’ want to prepare for the future.”

The future. His future. The globalist’s utopian future. If you don’t agree to the future we’ve visualized for you, you will suffer. This would NOT be an example of a leader of a democracy. Period. Sweeping democracy out from under us all is hardly the way to sell utopia. As much as you may disagree, it is hard for me to write critical pieces about people, but really, it is becoming very difficult to be quiet. Trudeau et al, you are selling us 15 minute cities, a technological hell world without privacy or freedom and expecting us to want to save the world. If it is a world we don’t want to live in, why would we? If the world is coming to an end, you’re all going to have to come up with something better than that.

Let’s start by stopping the support of wars shall we?

Oh here’s an earworm. It has the word eclipse in it:

The leaders are really convinced they’re doing the right thing…. They are hypnotized by their own voice, own ideology; so convinced that what they’re doing is bringing in utopia…. but it is dangerous because it lacks humility. They think they can control everything to a predicted outcome which is absurd in complex systems. They are willing to sacrifice 50% if not 100% of humans to make their ideological system real and that is the absurdness of this kind of thinking.”
Mattias Desmet (who advocates non-violent resistance)