Life Lessons in These Foggy Times Where Confusion Rules While Clarity Fades
Watch your step when your clear view vanishes, and your once-familiar world becomes murky and disorienting. This happens in politics and the media when powerful forces create confusion, leaving the public bewildered in a misty world, unaware of the negative consequences awaiting them.
When doctors in their white coats reassured us that smoking wasn't bad for your health since it purified your lungs, corporate profits, confusion, and lung cancer all won while the people lost. The audience lost track of reality in the fog of disinformation and was, for decades, too confused to make up their minds. Many smokers even coughed up the lies they had been fed, trying to convince others of a fake reality behind the smoke screen they blew out.
The truth about climate change was also lost for all those who couldn't discern between scientists warning to reduce the use of fossil fuels and fake scientists being paid by the oil and gas industry to spread lies about climate change.
This morning, I watched my step while photographing my village, caught in a massive fog's beautifying veil. The street and the traditional houses looked different from the many times I had passed. Suddenly, it looked mysterious and less clear, as did the path I tried to follow through the mist.
It made me remember that beyond the haze lies the real world, where truth shines brightly in the clear light of day. We need clarity to understand, whether in science, media, or politics. Information, education, and unbiased scientific insights are the torchlights to lead you out of the mist.
Beware of demagogues. They thrive in fog, where boundaries blur, and truths become elusive. In these foggy times, populist rhetoric obscures common values and decency, leaving us to navigate uncertain terrain with caution and discernment.
In this coastal village, where a climate change turbo-charged spring seems to have started during a winter that didn't live up to its reputation and looked remarkably like fall, a misty haze transformed the cobbled streets and centuries-old houses into an enchanting scene you may remember from a Dickens movie.
I woke early to enjoy the town's dreamlike tranquility, cloaked under this mysterious, damp blanket and capturing the photographs for this article. It felt like reliving one of those magical mornings on the Camino, appreciating the solitude and muted colors.
I love walking while everyone else is still asleep, except for some early birds high up in the still-naked branches of the trees, all singing beautifully to impress.
After a refreshing walk and seeing nobody outside except a girl walking with two shetland ponies and an old lady in a long red coat speeding unsteadily at significant risk on her electric bike, I returned home to see the first sign of the sun trying to burn a hole in the fog. It failed at that early hour, but the first glimpse of orange light behind my neighbor's 17th-century house would soon grow in force in the next hour and ignite a bright, sunny, albeit cold morning.
Back at home, with my first coffee in hand, I noted the weather app's opening page was an eye-catching fog warning, reminding us of the dangers in traffic accompanying these atmospheric conditions. Its AI-driven protocol is not trained to warn us of political turbulence, although it probably loves parallels between weather and politics.
Yet, just as a driver navigating a foggy road should proceed cautiously, we must tread carefully in a society shrouded in uncertainty and confusion. The inability to see clearly poses risks not only to our physical safety but also to our collective future in free and democratic societies.
In today's rapidly changing political landscape, it's understandable that some become disoriented and lose their way. The fog created by the media and politicians obscures our vision, clouding our judgment and distorting our perceptions. In this haze, it's challenging to discern truth from falsehood and clarity from confusion.
History is full of moments of mass confusion, often followed up by the rich and powerful abusing the chaos. It's a good reason to read and appreciate history; the truth becomes less blurred when you recognize parallels.
Knowing history increases your chances of standing on the right side of it. Someday, your kids will ask you where you stood when it was clear that populists left no doubt about their disdain for democracy or when human rights were trampled upon at a massive scale.
In the afternoon, I walked the same streets in bright sunlight and saw the world in all its colorful beauty. It was one of the first moments this year that I felt a bit of the sun's warmth on my face. I stopped and leaned against the wall of the 16th-century church to soak up the first warming rays of the season.
Soon after, the sun lost its strength on my island, focusing instead on the next continent to the west that the globe chose to expose. The fog returned even denser in my village than I had experienced in the morning. I stayed out, enjoying taking some of the photos I shared with you in this post.
I fear a global trend in which the colors fade, and the world around us becomes increasingly monochromatic. Many find themselves adrift in a sea of uncertainty and cling to the wreckage of drowned nuances, a sea of negativity where any lifeline thrown to them is presented in black and white.
The road ahead appears opaque and bewildering, leaving many of us feeling lost and powerless. In this vulnerable state, populist leaders usually emerge, promising to lead us out of the fog and into a brighter future resembling an imaginary glorious past.
We must resist the temptation of their false promises and simplistic solutions. Just as a driver lost in the fog must rely on a map to find their way, we must also turn to experts who have charted a course through the murky waters of uncertainty.
The word truth has been highjacked by liars, ignoring that it has been searched for and mapped out by reasonable, bright experts and scientists who never shied away from proposing complex solutions to complicated problems when there was no simple answer in black and white.
I continued my walk to the 12th-century castle, which has been renovated and extended over the centuries. The misty haze made the view picture-perfect, and while I took it, I knew that the castle photo was worthy of this story's opening picture.
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Perfect mirrors of this incoming frosted Spring. Thoughts gliding into words, hands waiting to grasp the moment, morning mists dashing the shape of things, the near silence against the walls, shivering in the cold and relentless discontent of stolen and uncertain days. Nevertheless, in these rushing times and changing seasons, there always will be consciences blooming, pushing and raising new beginnings.
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees […] I had that familiar conviction that life beginning over with the summer.” - F.Scott Fitzgerald
Beautiful! So lovely how the beauty of a natural phenomenon, inspired you to such an apt analogy for our so confused times!
You hit on it that the loss of our shared values is at play here. It’s the long grinding failing of our systems to care for all, as human values like fairness, compassion, humility and a surrender to something beyond one’s selfish assertions, whether the Common Good, or Divinity, or some other form of the Unseen (in reality, not in name only). Ive found it’s ‘wilful deceit in my own best interest’ divorced from any sense of belonging to all, or caring for a greater good, that feeds the confusion; and clears the way for the sensibility of the demagogues, even in their vagary and their lies, to have power in the fog. It’s the million little ways that individuals served themselves and their small personal interests, instead of understanding no one survives if we destroy everything, starting with the TRUTH, one lie at a time.
I was there while the oil companies dominated alternative energy research, and the body of every science paper said we MUST RAPIDLY INVEST IN THIS REASEARCH/TECHNOLOGY, but the conclusions, which would hit the newspapers shortly after we proofed them for publication, ALWAYS said fossil fuels were the only viable source available, until we could develop these new technologies further…
I learned to check the funders of these studies: every time, Big Oil… and almost no one else was engaged in funding that science at all.
I was there when Reagan did his story about trickle down economics… but yeah, history. There’s no time in recorded history where it EVER happened that way.
I read the Op-Ed from the insurance company professional admitting they falsified the data and manipulated the public to kill a single payer system, because it would dissolve insurance companies power over medicine. And 12 yrs later, now retired, he felt so guilty he had to do a public confession, acknowledging that a single payer system could be developed and be effective, and provide medical care effectively and equally to everyone, but insurance companies don’t want people to know that… because they’d become irrelevant…
The fog descends when dishonesty and selfishness are rewarded over integrity and honesty. There’s a lot of fear of loss of ‘my good’, before the fog gets this thick.
And then there’s decent people who didn’t get the chances, as the systems became more and more unequal, and they’re desperate, and ripe for quick fixes, especially when they don’t have the skills or the opportunities to make the system work. Or those who know better, but are desperately afraid of loss: loss of safety, loss of power, loss of a job, or wealth or influence, so even when they approach doing the right thing, they recoil back into the fog.
That’s why we’re all stuck in it together now… and why, now, only radical acts of bravery (including honest scientists, writers, journalists, leaders, even retired insurance pros finally, telling the truth) shine a real light in the fog…
And please keep gently reminding people Alex! Keep shining through the fog!!! Because obviously, I, and many others, need your vision and your hope!!!