It might be the darkening days. Or maybe it’s the cool airwafting in from the formerly frozen north reminding us that nothing ispermanent. Not even us.

Yikes, ok. Especially us.

I’ve outlived enough generations now to know that achildhood spent cowering under school desks against a nuclear bomb attack isnot the same as a childhood spent cowering under the blue-light unreality ofTik Tok.

However terrifying and trauma-inducing those two experiencesare, we are not the same animals. The animal has changed stripes.

Here’s one example. I am shocked and embarrassed for youngwomen I see setting up their phones and prancing around for selfie videos.  Seriously? I would slink out of the ladies’room if someone caught me primping, ashamed someone would think that I thoughtmy appearance warranted a second thought when the world is burning.

Here’s the news flash: the world is always burning.  Always has been. These kids got the memo. Dieyoung, stay pretty. BE pretty. Even if you use filters to achieve prettiness,it doesn’t matter. It’s what’s on the screen that’s real.

Currently, there are 45 armed conflicts in the world, notjust the two that are receiving all the outraged press in the USA. (Thank youLucian Truscott III for pointing that out in a recent article in Salon).  Atrocities that we animals are visiting onone another are being recorded and passed around. War porn. The side thatrecords the most “thumbs up” videos wins in the international court of Tik Tok.

Americans understand the power of TT and are using it toestablish our moral superiority and invincibility. Our prettiness is intact. Thelast twenty years, the federal government forbade the media to run pictures offlag-covered caskets of our soldiers returning home, as if to make it not so.Schools are banning the teaching of our violent history to make it not so.  It’ll take 100 years for some newer modelhuman animal to discover what we are now in the process of forgetting. Or maybethe task will fall to AI.

Look at all the shit we already forgot. When the news ofHenry Kissinger’s death was reported, I would have found it amusing if itdidn’t show how stupid people can be, that we forgot how the US murderouslymeddles in other countries affairs if it is in our economic interest.

Excuse me, that’s wrong. If it’s in the economic interest ofbillionaire investors in those countries. Another issue, for another time. 

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. That discussion felloff the agenda as quickly as it was put up there.  As if, whew! Kissinger’s dead, so we’re notdoing THAT anymore. As if we ever stopped. Because we now do it under the cloakof shell corporations where Tik Tok dares not shine a light. There’s no filterstrong enough to camouflage what goes on under THAT cloak.

I keep wondering when the fall-out from those dealings willreveal itself.

In that sense, we haven’t changed. We’re still coweringunder our desks, waiting for the bomb to drop.