The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The times we live in, this fresh start to the 21st Century, seems, at first glance, to be a cauldron of craziness generated by the internet and the tribalism of every media out there. From politics to pandemic, there’s no shortage of whackiness. Science and logic, who needs em? We got superstition and magic to cure the anxiety and dread of this era. Sometimes it seems as if we’d barely left the caves of the Dark ages, just clung to whatever amulets and spells that gave us comfort against the marauding mastodons or the horror of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The pundits and the talking heads lament the internet, social media, cable TV, consolidated radio and the cynicism of our politicians. Bullshit passes for alternative facts and insanity gets you elected. Oh me, oh my, what’s gonna come of me boys, what’s gonna come of me?

We like to think we live in an Enlightened Age, one where reason and logic reveal the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. The internet ruined that, we think. Social media made a mockery of that, some say. I say the internet and social media probably just pulled back the curtains on all those folks who have always believed more in superstition than science, more who think they might win the lottery despite the statistical odds or that supplements will cure what ails them, more who take comfort in unprovable beliefs than facts that make them squirm, more that find faith in the unknowable more compelling than the angst of the knowable.

The Dark Age denizens never really left, they just didn’t have an internet to give them a microphone. We just under-estimated their numbers. And we over-estimated our own. Age of Enlightenment? Don’t kid yourself.

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