What in the World...

It’s been quiet around this blog for quite some time now, even as the noise level from the “Medical Freedom Movement” (or whatever you’d like to call it) Substack community seems to be increasing exponentially. I read or skim what’s being said, and then I feel compelled to go do something else. Anything else. Like so many things in this present version of reality, it is painful to watch.

I would like, sometime soon, to include at least one more segment relating to “what is food”. Then there is the question of “what is science”, but I don’t care for that as the title of a series, and I am not sure I want to commit to that much research anyway. Later. In little bites.

Another goal is to write about the history of a certain pharmaceutical that may have drastically altered the course of my life when given to my mother while she was carrying me, if indeed that was what happened. I don’t know for sure. I do know that it happened to many others over the course of 30 years, and that it may explain certain things that are currently regarded as unexplained, kind of like the current unexplained disease epidemic that has an obvious explanation that can’t be expressed. Again, there is research that I would first need to finish reviewing.

Leaving those things aside for now, what in the world is going on?!

I have been asking “what in the world” questions since I was rather young. I remember taking a tour back in those days of what must have been a tug boat, docked I-don’t-clearly-remember-where (or why we were there). Near Seattle-Tacoma, Washington, possibly, circa 1958. There was a large round something-or-other on the deck, and I asked “what in the world is that?" The answer came back, “it’s a searchlight”.

I had likely seen similar things before — a handheld searchlight that belonged to my father comes to mind, or limelights aimed skyward to draw attention to an event — but not up close and of that size lying face down or up (I forget which) on the deck of a tug boat. We can fail to recognize even familiar things when they appear to us out of their ordinary context. In this instance, the answer still came easily, through someone else older and more knowlegeable.

Answering “what in the world is going on” is more difficult. In Western culture, we used to have easy answers, if one didn’t look too closely. For hundreds of years there was “Christendom” in one form or another. Shredded bits of it were still hanging on when I was born in 1950, and in the decade or so that followed, being none the wiser, I had the idea that that was what the world was like. My parents later admitted to leading me to remain naive.

I look back upon those days in disbelief, and yet I see that they held something that now has been lost. I was taught truths that have stood throughout time. I also learned things that were not sound, but the thing about truth is that it sticks around. I can look back over my 72+ years and beyond (beyond, through stories from my parents and grandparents), in light of the truths that I learned, and it makes sense. My vision of earlier times is not perfect, but it has grounding.

I wonder, then, what younger people have going for them when they try to understand their world. I can see things that many of them don’t have going for them, such as span of years, or spiritual and moral understanding that was no longer widely transmitted from generation to generation, or numerous examples of people leading upright lives, or the discipline and maturity that come from being raised “strictly”.

Some do have some of these benefits, but even then I notice that their teachers often are younger people as well, dealing with similar issues. The older generations appear more sickly (because they are — thank you, science and technology, for that), and less involved, and they are not always welcome to work alongside younger teachers whose self-impressions of their own knowledge and wisdom may sometimes be in proportion to how ignorant they actually are. I have encountered this personally.

If a society is to continue, the older generations must pass knowledge and wisdom on to the younger ones. Parents must learn to be parents, and they can’t learn that from books. But when their parents are often hundreds or thousands of miles away, for a myriad of “modern” reasons, what can they do? Chat with them on the phone? And children need a break from their parents sometimes. Grandparents can be very good for that, but where are they?

Children must learn from their parents, but when their parents can’t parent well, what are the children to do? What if the parents can’t even stay together? What if the children succumb to “unexplained” illnesses? (And the fathers leave, as they often do when faced with seriously impaired children.) What if? What if? What if?

What in the world is going on? Well, perhaps the matters above are part of the answer to that. The problem, however, centers around and in us. We enter life extremely immature. Many depart life still so. There is a way out of this situation. It is not quick, easy, or convenient. The knowlege of what to do is still with us, but it has been rejected and discarded by many. It can be regained.

It starts with the realization that our world is created. It didn’t “make itself”. Nothing does that. What we imagine happens is not necessarily what actually happens. We can so easily be wrong.

This creation in which we live is unbelievably well designed and detailed, beyond our limited imaginations, vastly beyond the perceptions of our senses. It is art and science and engineeering together, on a scale beyond anything that humans can do. We can do nothing but build upon that which has already been accomplished.

Are we attentive to that? Are we grateful?

The creation gives us strong hints about where we came from. You might want to ask some questions of that. You might be surprised at the answers you receive. There is much more I could say, and I am certainly willing to do so, but the Internet is less than the ideal medium for doing it. Any words I use will be understood differently by different people, because of the diverse ways those words are used. There is a language barrier. The way around that is conversation. Feel free to converse here.