That's pathetic ...and it is no excuse ...well, it may be an excuse (and I'm sure many will use it) but not an acceptable excuse or one which carries any value or has any deterrence effect against stormy weather.

No-one has to tell you. No-one is tasked to tell you. It is no-one's job to tell you. The rules of life dictate that you have to find out for yourself ... or ... live in ignorance ...and be subject to the vicissitudes of fate, delivered with cold-hearted implacability and excuse-ignoring indifference. Life couldn't care less whether you know what's what, or not.

So, when your world implodes ...when all around you turns to chaos ...when other folk are milling around in panic ...not knowing why whatever is going on is going on ...will you be among them? Or will you have amassed sufficient knowledge to have already removed yourself from the scene of the chaos or are sufficiently prepared to do so before it all reaches a point beyond which there is no escape?

It will do you no good at that time to say "...but ...but ...nobody told me...".

And even if word had somehow reached you, would you have listened? ..and understood? ...and would you have been prepared to adjust your position and outlook? ...even if it meant taking a less comfortable one? ...one requiring much heart-searching, thought and planning? ...and possibly of dismissing friends and relatives who deride you for your new position? It is a lot to ask of anyone living in a relatively comfortable society where decisions on matters of importance have been entrusted to others of supposedly greater ability and cultural ethics. And therein lies the nub of the problem. We have given away our inbuilt guidance and handed it to someone else or some other institution or ideology. And have thereby lost our freedom of action and dimmed our innate protective senses, to the point at this stage in time of not even caring to think at all on such matters as were once so important to us - except perhaps for a few minutes come election time every few years. And even then objecting to the intrusive distraction that makes to our 'normal' all too complicated life.

And so we take for our everyday guidance whatever is 'issued' as and from the voice of society, broadcast to us, since we have accumulated all the gadgetry dictated by society to hear and receive that voice, wherever we are, repetitively, so we don't forget, and all end up with the same set of opinions - since it is too hard to form our own opinions - which would be frowned on just as much as simply questioning the broadcast narrative beyond anything but marginal issues.

We have become distracted zombies. Whose only reaction to any circumstance outside what is considered 'normal' - such as unanticipated change - is to utter the immortal phrase...

..but ...but ...nobody told me...

Well, I have been trying to tell you, now for many years, in this blog and other places. And so have many others.

Ok, I have not resorted to running naked through the highways and byways handing out leaflets (yet). I am not crazy ...or at least not sufficiently crazy to pull those sort of stunts which might attract attention. It is not attention I am seeking. It is those who at one stage, like myself, felt the tug of the idea that 'all is not right with the world', and is anybody else thinking the same way? And 'are they sane'? And 'what are they saying'? And 'does it make sense'?

Well, that is for you to come to that point and ask yourself those questions, and find your own answers.

I/we (those who reach out with their truth on important matters - admittedly not easy to find - but a darned sight easier today that in any previous era, and in relative privacy) can't do that for you. It is a step you need to reach and to take for yourself. But first you must come to realise that you are situated somewhere in the middle of a herd of sheep, and you must somehow work your way to the fringes of that herd and look out to see that there are more things than smelly sheep in the world. And if, having seen all that, you are not convinced those 'other things' are perhaps worth far more than just being another sheep, then make your way back to the centre of the herd and forget all I have just said.

As with everything in life, in the final analysis, the choice is yours.

...with apologies to all our fleecy friends and their little baa-lambs.

Author

Bernard ("Bernie") Edwards blogs at NotSomethingElse and lives "as simply as I can, working towards having as few dependencies on the industrial system as possible" in Australia.

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