The Split in Society

We are living in a time of great contradiction.

The more we learn, the stranger is our political world.

People have never been so enlightened. Knowledge, long ago, was accessible to only a privileged few. Most human beings, lacking any real understanding, were guided by dark superstitions and easily herded about by those in power.

We’ve only had public education in America for 150 years or so. Printed words for 600 years, telegraph for maybe 200, radios for 150, movies for 120, TV for 75, and the internet for about 40. It gets harder and harder to herd people around when they are figuring things out for themselves. That’s a tremendous and growing contradiction.

People of my generation can remember when segregation ruled. We can remember that people laughed when Desi spanked Lucy on the world’s most popular TV program. We can remember poll taxes, white primaries, and English-only ballots. We remember when little children were spanked for speaking Spanish. We may have a long way to go, but we have come a long way, too!

If one thinks of human enlightenment as human progress, one sees a continuum of gains that has never completely stopped and is not likely to ever stop. Remember the apelike creatures in the movie “2001?” They huddled in the darkness while predators roamed around them. Then they began to learn. We are learning still, but at an accelerating pace.

The other side of the contradiction is that we are still being herded around by the people in power. They pretend that their arguments are “equal” or “the other side,” but they aren’t. They aren’t “alternative facts,” they are just lies.

Their rulers’ methods of superstition, divisiveness, chauvinism, and general backwardness are less and less effective. Something will have to give eventually, and it has to be them.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” program on 89.3FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, check our my personal web site