Anastasia,
Without sounding dramatic or exaggerating, I truly think our country does not have many decades left until collapse. The internet and cable/satellite along with social media have brought ruin on us all. We have learned a lot in the last decades about so many people's opinions that clash that it has brought about a constant confusion in most of the population. I'll take a small, silly example, ok? Eggs. I know, sounds silly.....For years The WHO, American physicians, AMA, all of the health brain trusts have told us that eggs are so full of cholesterol that, if we eat them, we'll get heart disease, strokes, and keel over. The vitriol against eggs has been a constant. And in the past few years with Keto and other diets, we're seeing this egg myth is nonsense, pure and simple. I myself was a vegan for a while and bought a lot of goods a liberal vegan friend of mine was selling. So, now you get on the internet, you hear the vegans screaming at the top of their lungs, plant-based stuff, Netflix documentaries about plant-based and how it'll save us all, and on the other side is the keto crowd. I personally have watched my Lipid profile improve, my blood pressure become healthy, my weight come off, and many problems disappear with keto. Yet the internet is telling me otherwise. So I raise an eyebrow. This is just FOOD! We get lied to on the internet all the time. How many times have we found out that something had more to it than we thought, or that something was taken out of context? The media coronated Hillary Clinton Queen of America and discounted Trump as a joke. The polls they run were biased and absurd, and they were proven wrong. So why should we trust the news or polls now?
COVID-19 was a plague that is going to vanquish us all like Constantinople in the Black Death, and yet.....when George Floyd was choked, all of a sudden, for 3 weeks of rioting and BLM nonsense, the media quit talking about Corona Virus! It was suddenly cool to run around with a bunch of sweaty thugs and be within 2 millimeters of one another......as long as it is for a 'good' cause like pulling down a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue! Weeks of protests and riots and violence.....and instantly Amazon, Nike, Verizon, and every single company in America jumps in line with "We decry racial intolerance and violence and proclaim Black Lives Matter!!!" I had to have gotten 50 emails from things I subscribe to telling me that same lock-step fascist message. The corporations have to toe the line. So, after all this nonsense, the biased coverage against the President praying for his impeachment and hysterically blasting poor Judge Kavanaugh dragging his family through the muck, the support for riots and violence and "cancel culture," etc. and the suspicious suspension of COVID hysteria.....then a return to the hysteria.....why should we trust the media at all?
You get on the internet in forums (not this one) and see one phony quote after another attributed to Mark Twain, Hitler, Abraham Lincoln, or MLK. Doctors have pandered to drugs like statins and other poisonous killing meds for years so now people go full goofball the other way and become "anti-vaxxers." They don't trust doctors.
I was in Israel and Jordan when the news in the States was proclaiming a heated conflict in Syria. The Israelis and Jordanians I was with on our trip took us to the Syrian border a few times on different sides. There was no warring going on. They even said all the poor refugees had returned to Syria because the violence was over. You could see the empty camps and things vacated. It was quiet over there. Then we get home from the Middle East, and I hear a few weeks later things were supposedly starting to calm down over there. Yeah, right. Again, should I trust the media?
The internet has given people a place to spread lies, organize their Brown Shirt type BLM social destabilization efforts, spread hysteria about pandemics, and there are so many phony actors on the internet that truth becomes so blurry that one can scarcely find it.
America is starting to look like Germany post World War I. Violence is everywhere, socialist brown shirt thugs are forcing an agenda, groups are looking to break off from America and form their little enclaves like that stupid CHAZ thing in Seattle or they're creating "sanctuaries" be they Second Amendment sanctuaries or Illegal Alien Sanctuaries. The rule of law means nothing. Maniacs want to defund our police departments and leave us all vulnerable, cancel out our history in favor of a brave new world where Harvey Milk statues will abound, and I see a fierce persecution of the Church coming. It's already starting in places like Toronto denying the Eucharist to Christians, and now I'm sure it'll spread to California even worse. Gavin Newsom is a tyrant.
Social Media has shown us a side of people we frankly don't want to see! I've actually lost respect for scores of people I've known when I got on Facebook years back and saw how liberal they were or how immoral they were outside of work. It has gotten me into fights with dear friends that I have since decided aren't worth it. Social media encourages us to bare our souls and our ugly sides way too far. It tracks our likes and dislikes, it catalogues us as human beings, and it's just plain odious overall.
There is no hunger for objective truth anymore, just fabrications, propaganda, and agendas. When people like Jussie Smollett perpetrate a false white supremacist assault story that is exposed, the Left says, "well, it wasn't right, but he had the right intention. Trying to make whites look bad is a good motivation, so let's not judge the guy too hard."
Epstein "kills himself" and we all just whisper.....
Congresswomen on the left go around telling their constituents, "hey, if you run into a Republican in a restaurant, get in their faces! Shout them down! Ruin their dinners! Nail em!"
Guys like Jordan Petersen or Dinesh D'Souza go to a college campus and the kids shout them down because cogent, intelligent arguments are no longer academically welcome.
C-SPAN showed us how the sausage is made in Congress. And, man, it ain't pretty. That was the beginning of "too much reality" for Americans, I think.
History is no longer valued whatsoever. Robert E. Lee freed his slaves and was not a fan of the idea of secession from the Union. He was a good man with a strong legacy, and he was anti-slavery, but because he could not sleep at night knowing he'd have to draw his saber and pull his pistol on his fellow Virginians, he fought for the Confederacy. His statue is now trampled. There is so much about the Confederacy and the War Between the States that people don't take the time to read, or so much about Teddy Roosevelt that people on the Left ignore! He was anti-trust, a fierce protector of national parks setting aside land that could not be developed, an environmentalist, a hater of monopolies, and he was sympathetic to the muckrakers of his age, but.....heck, he said a few unkind things about black folks on a couple of occasions---ERASED.
Go back and look at the Killing Fields era of Cambodia----the Khmer Rouge.....they forced a "Year Zero" agenda on their people. It was Cambodia's socialist "cancel culture" for the 1970's. It was terrifying and the result was unthinkable. The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward and Hitler's Year One style book burning and cancel culture of the Nazi socialist agenda was frightening. Stalin and the boys had the same year one/zero agenda. Cancel the past. Just trust US!
When all the media, doctors, and even psychiatrists and teachers can no longer be trusted and trolls and hackers and goons abound, a country is on the brink of implosion, I have to agree, Anastasia, these are lousy times.
The funny thing is, I lost a very very very dear friend (who is majorly liberal) recently, and yet relations with my own parents are better politically because they've switched things around. They voted for Hillary, but my parents are fiercely patriotic and proud of America's heroes. My parents are very anti-LGBT, thank God, and very pro-second amendment. They see this rioting, cancel culture stuff, politically correct garbage, and they're looking forward to voting Trump next time. So, politics can sure be bizarre. Lose one person, gain one back.
We live in paranoid times. Everything is a conspiracy, someone is watching us, out to get us, the Russians are hacking us, whatever people want to believe......spooky. No objective truth in anything. Thanks be to God we have the Lord and the Orthodox Church! Christ is always our light in any mess.