Believe it or not...

It matters.

Is Bill Gates trying to use vaccines to implant tracking devices to control us? Will the “Jewish lasers” in space start more fires in California this season? Do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton smell of sulphur and drink the blood of babies as part of a satanic cabal? Were Sandy Hook and Parkland “false flag” events populated by “crisis actors" and not really the site of dead children? These seemingly insane questions come from and are answered in the context of belief systems… and as you all know, we’ve got a whole lot of those to choose from. The stark and necessary truth is that what we choose to individually and collectively believe has everything to do with the the fate of our nation and that of ourselves; in short how we will live or die.

Quoting from a recent piece in the NYT by Dr. Shoshonna Zuboff:

In 1966, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote “The Social Construction of Reality.” Its central observation is that the “everyday life” we experience as “reality” is actively and perpetually constructed by us. This ongoing miracle of social order rests on “common sense knowledge,” which is “the knowledge we share with others in the normal self-evident routines of everyday life.”

Think about traffic: There are not enough police officers in the world to ensure that every car stops at every red light, yet not every intersection triggers a negotiation or a fight. That’s because in orderly societies we all know that red lights have the authority to make us stop and green lights are authorized to let us go. This common sense means that we each act on what we all know, while trusting that others will too. We’re not just obeying laws; we are creating order together. Our reward is to live in a world where we mostly get where we are going and home again safely because we can trust one another’s common sense. No society is viable without it.

In a “fact free” world constructed wholly out of beliefs, are the stop lights that prevent chaos and keep society going to be agreed upon and obeyed? In our current age of questioning everything if it comes from a source we distrust, and the willingness to trust everything from sources that confirm our beliefs, is there any way that we can learn, grow and evolve to both live a meaningful life of our own and a insure a viable society for others? Especially now, while still in the grips of a global pandemic and with social and political divisions inflamed to a boiling point, these are the questions that are haunting me and I suspect a lot of you.

Tomorrow the Senate will begin the 2nd Impeachment of the former Celebrity Apprentice President. At the core of the proceedings will be the story of his efforts to propagate “The Big Lie”, his story of a “rigged” or “stolen” election. A story, worked tirelessly for weeks and months, compelling enough for thousands, at his urging, to take up arms, and storm the Capitol with the intent to stop Congress from certifying an election that was free and fair by all responsible accounts…including those of the Trump Administration Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security. Those peoples belief systems, rooted in grievance, were ripe and ready for “The Big Lie” to take hold, and a steady stream of messaging, from no less than the POTUS, the person who personified and shared their sense of grievance was rocket fuel for a movement to “take back America” and leave the dead and injured in its wake.

There will be procedural ducking and dodging to be sure, but in the end, each member of the US Senate will have to take a stand about where to draw the line about “The Big Lie” and the consequences that came from it. They will also have to answer questions about how their own actions as national leaders have molded the belief systems of the thousands that were and remain all too ready to act out their sense of grievance in ways that on Jan. 6 threatened their very own lives. Space lasers, vaccine conspiracies, false flags…all of this will continue regardless, but in the coming days we will we see if those we elected take a stand that draws a line for truth to begin to restore our faith in what we can believe about our nation and ourselves.