Disconnected

This post is dedicated to Sam. I happened to visit her page. I commented on her post with an attempt to give her my view of how we have as found ourselves lonelier and more disconnected than at any time in our history. Mental illness is on the rise which is evident in the increasing devastating mass shootings in our schools, churches, theatres and concerts. At the heart of it all is a divide as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Our country is split as it was in the 1960s and ’70s when I was a teen and young adult. The revolution then was fueled by civil rights injustice, the Vietnam war with governments lies, and equal rights for women. Communes and “free love” came with the “Peace movement”. With that increasing use of recreational and experimental drugs like LSD were on the rise.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great leader who empowered black society to stand up against those who hated them because of their skin color. Those peaceful protest he led were met with great hostility and injustice, and though they suffered greatly it began to change our society. The separation of blacks from whites in public places began to fade. Whites who supported the movement also helped to change the laws and gradually discrimination gave way to affirmative action. Over the long years ahead, even the South would come to accept interracial marriage and the scourge of inequality would wane. It is doubtful that prejudice will ever disappear, but that era brought more advancement for the Black race than the Civil War because, although we gave them their freedom, we did not include equal rights under the law especially in the side that lost, the wounded South.

The Vietnam War was a political tool. Fifty eight thousand two hundred young American men and women lost their lives to advance the agenda of the powerful in Washington, DC. Moreover the ones who survived were hated and spat on by opposing political forces who ostracized them. They came home not only physically wounded but mentally unable to adjust from the horrors of an enemy they could not see who fought with no rules of morality. In defense a few American soldiers lost their morality as well  and tainted the entirety of our military forces. Today, almost half a century later, some still have never heard the words “Welcome home.” We as a country failed these brave men and women. It was a time of great injustice to those who sought to protect freedom of an oppressed society. They were betrayed.

The greatest loss of that era was not the Vietnam War. It was the advancement of the rights of women. Rowe vs. Wade started a distortion of morality which would come to claim more lives than the civil rights of blacks or the Vietnamese War. In fact 50 million abortions have been performed since 1973 according to a Pro-Life accounting.  Combined with “free love” came the need to dispose of its consequences. Abortion clinics sprang up and over time have come to be so deplorable as to sell body parts of fetuses. Their argument is that a fetus is simply “cells and tissue” and yet partial birth abortion goes as far as ripping babies from the mother’s womb at full development. We have always pronounced a person dead when their heart stop beating, yet will not pronounce a fetus alive when its heart starts beating. This is all for a woman’s convenience. Fathers who want their children are seldom considered. Though there are many people out there who want to adopt children because they cannot physically have their own, women choose to abort rather than give a right to their child to live.

There are no lines of morality to follow anymore. As a society we keep going further down into a murky existence. The government has decided in our schools they should, for the “rights” of first graders, allow the child to decide what sex they are. No first grade child has the ability to decide almost anything for themselves much less sex which they don’t truly understand. Their brains are not capable of such decisions. Parents are no longer allowed to bring up their children with a sense of stability. The revolution of “free love” and “peace” have become leaders in our government and society and fight for power at all costs. They are bloated with an insatiable desire to handle the purse strings and make the decisions on how all should live according to what they believe. It is a socialistic and communistic philosophy which has never worked in any country.

For as many people as there are in the country, there are as many different opinions which range from far Left to far Right. Corruption in our government has never been worse. Children are brought up with so called “values” which are no values at all. They are ideas based on narcissistic rather than altruistic philosophies. We’ve lost our way. There is no path to progression. Progression should be an upward movement. Those that claim to be “progressive” seem to be pulled by gravitational forces into an abyss. Unfortunately those who oppose those extreme progressive views are not fighting back with the same vigor. The lines have become so blurred between right and wrong that those with a central point of view have become wall flowers whose voices no one hears. They aren’t heard because extremists yell the loudest.

Through all of our advances in technology we have lost the most valuable glue. We are separated by a small screen and keyboard. We can yell obscenities to one another without having to face each other face to face or hear each other’s true voice. We are disconnected by a force which was meant to bring us closer together. There is a veil which allows our faces to be hidden and our egos to be driven farther and farther into unfettered thoughts without discourse filtered by some inhibition. No one has the time to listen to another. No one wants to be challenged to come together and find common ground. This disconnection fuels the separation of ideas, not the melding of ideas for a more cohesive society.

©Phyllis Weeks Rogers 06/23/2018