Things Are Pretty Crazy

I’m really good at remembering things. When I was in elementary school and high school I didn’t have to take notes because I remembered everything the teachers told us. I remembered important historical dates, remembered details about famous events and famous people, and I remembered everything in the many books I read. So I knew all the answers on tests because the answers were things we’d been told or I had read. I don’t think I was smarter than my peers; I just remembered everything, and school rewarded us for how well we could regurgitate what we’d been fed.

After I quit college when I was nineteen, I read thousands of books and remembered virtually everything I read. I was a treasure trove of information, most of which other people, including my good friends, had little interest in. I read books about ecology, anthropology, the environment, history, neurology, biology, evolution, and foreign affairs, and I was eager to share this information. However, almost no one I knew wanted to hear from me what I had learned.

By the time I was in my late twenties I had largely stopped trying to share information because not only were people disinterested in what I’d learned, what I did share made people angry. I’m referring to pollution, over-population, government corruption, clandestine foreign intervention, criminal economic manipulation, history, global warming, environmental destruction, and what was really going on in our society and the world, and what the consequences would be if we didn’t change our collective behavior.

Now I’m seventy-six and everything I read and learned sixty and fifty and forty and thirty years ago about what was going to happen to our country and our society and the planet, the bad stuff, has happened and is happening. And still most people don’t want to hear about how and why these terrible things happened and are happening.

I went through a phase of being upset with people for not wanting to know what was really going on. Then I came to understand why they didn’t want to know. What humans have done and are doing to the earth and to each other is so terrible that hearing about it is too painful for most people to bear, so they avoid the truth and listen to things that are easier to accept even though most of those things they listen to aren’t true.

When the United States at the behest of Israel attacked Iran on February 28, 2026 I delved into why the United States and Israel did this, why they failed so completely, and how they simultaneously destroyed the world economy. I spent hundreds of hours listening to learned people with great troves of factual information about myriad aspects of the ongoing war as well as tangential foreign affairs, world history, American history, and many other connected matters, and I remembered all of it. What I learned is fascinating to me and of little interest to most people I know, partly because the truth is so terrible, and partly because the truth is so complex.

When I do engage in conversations with people about what’s really going on regarding the war in Iran and the world economy and in America, most people refuse to believe my information and get mad at me for telling them what I’ve learned. Thus I no longer try to share what I’ve learned about our present reality and instead say, “Things are pretty crazy. That’s for sure.”

fin

The Way Things Go from Todd’s album Lounge Act In Heaven