We Are All Crazy On This Bus to Nowhere

WE ARE ALL AWARE THAT SOMETHING HAS GONE TERRIBLY WRONG WITH OUR GOVERNMENT, OUR MEDIA, OUR RELIGIONS, AND, INDEED, WITH OUR CULTURE AND OUR CIVILIZATION.

Bob Dylan put it this way back in 1965:

“Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones?”

We are all Mr. and Mrs. Joneses. We know something is happening, but we don’t know what it is….but I have some suspicions.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why our leaders seem to be behaving as if they are in a drunken stupor?

Did it ever occur to you that this is EXACTLY what is going on?

Just about everyone I know is on some kind of mood-altering drug, and that’s probably true for you as well, even if you don’t know what each person is on. If everyone we know is on some kind of mood-altering drug, isn’t it possible that EVERYONE is on some kind of mood-altering drug of either the legal or the illegal varieties (or legal varieties obtained illegally), everything from alcohol to hydrocodone.

Whether it is alcohol, Adderall, Latuda, pot, or laughing gas, everyone in this civilization is on one psycho-active drug or another.

To make things worse, there are many drugs that are not prescribed for psychiatric issues that nevertheless have an impact on our brains and our emotions. How many of the drug advertisements for pharmaceuticals that one physical ailment or another come with a warning that the drug may cause severe depression and thoughts of suicide?

(By my count, over a 24 hour period, 75% of the drugs advertised included such warnings)

These drugs are pernicious because, in some cases, they make insane people sane, until they forget or refuse to take them, or they lose their potency against the condition for which they were prescribed, or they simply wear off during the course of the day so that someone who is sane at 9 AM turns into a raving lunatic at 9 PM.

So, if everyone is on something, that means that our politicians, our corporate leaders, our journalists, and our doctors (especially the doctors) are probably on some kind of mood-altering drug, is it any wonder that nothing seems to make any sense anymore?

I remember, back in the sixties, trying to organize rallies and demonstrations (and other, more aggressive actions) when everyone was high as a kite didn’t actually work out very well.

Here’s something else to think about: The rare individuals who aren’t on anything probably should be on something, with Donald Trump being the prototypical case in point (unless he is actually on something but we don’t know about it because a person’s medications are held secret by their physicians under federal law.)

Here’s another thing to think about: Religion is just another drug. Religions have the same mind-altering, behavior controlling effects  that distorts human behavior. The term religion, in this case, includes the Big Six (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Shintoism, Confucianism,  and the Hindu faiths) as well as everything else from paganism to shamanism to Yoga and schools of meditation and even martial arts. All political philosophies are actually religions, along with all economic theories, because they are all based on the basic principle of trust in authority, and it is trust in authority that is the cause of all corruption.

Everyone is on something.

We were warned about this. Aldus Huxley warned us about this in Brave New World. George Orwell warned us about this in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Sinclair Lewis warned us in It Can’t Happen Here and several other books. Numerous other authors have warned us in different ways that we were heading in this direction.,..and, now, we’re there.

If you are looking for sanity in our business dealings, our political leadership, our political parties, our religions, our news organizations, and our social interactions, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Every country on this planet is overrun by madmen and madwomen who have seized control over the the controlling mechanisms of our civilization and are driving straight off the main road onto the side street that leads to an inescapable precipice.

The inmates have been in control of the asylum since the first tribes degenerated into the first city-states, and the problem has been accelerating since end of the American Civil War.

There’s an old Sufi story that summarizes the situation this way.

There was a wise king who was fortunate enough to have a Vizir who was a man of true vision.

One day, the Vizir came to the king with a terrible secret,.

“Our wheat harvest has been contaminated with a fungus that causes madness…but I have managed to find enough uncontaminated grain for the two of us to remain sane until the next harvest.”

The King, who was also a man of wisdom, shook his head and said. “This will not suffice because if we sequester ourselves from the people during this year of madness, they will think that we are the madmen and they will rebel against our leadership.”

“Then what shall we do?”

“We shall share the bread of affliction with our people and go mad with them so that we will not seem alien to them, but you and I will wear these emblems on our foreheads so that when we look at each other we will remember that we are mad and will modify our behavior accordingly.”

So, the king and his Vizir went mad with their people but, because they knew they were mad, they were able to keep the situation under control so that when the next planting season came around they were able to organize the country to return to normal.

In our case, alas, the king was already crazy to begin with and the only way his advisers can keep their jobs is by agreeing with the madman’s opinions so that we are being lead by insane people who are being supported by insane followers and who are being opposed by insane dissidents who are so busy trying to thwart the insane king’s madness that they are not able to see that they have been driven mad by their efforts to get insane people to think sanely.

By the way, the emblem that the king and his vizir drew on their foreheads was a question mark.