At some point, (and possibly, that could have been from the beginning of time), the ‘how’ something was said far outweighed the ‘what’.  That’s been called lots of things like, the art of persuasion, influence peddling, preaching, lobbying, bull pucky or the six o’clock news.  The Internet, since its miniscule blip in history, has taken messaging to a whole new level of absurdity.  The shear volume of content, spewed willy-nilly, minimally filtered, multi-lingually from every on-line cranny of the planet has made any assurance of verisimilitude virtually impossible.  There is no longer a Walter Cronkite for most of us to trust so, we pick and choose our information based on some amorphous personal standard and blindly trust that whatever fact checking has been done has a relatively low bullshit factor.

For someone like me, whose bi-polarity categorizes most things in my world as either black or white, the cacophony created by all that blather is not so hard to navigate.  That’s not to say that I have some magical power to differentiate the truthfulness of every post or tweet or meme, (although I do have a fast-paced mechanism of acceptance, denial or not giving a rat’s ass), but the big picture issues, the ones that truly impact nature and society…well, you don’t need to be bi-polar to parse that shit.  When we realized how much the Industrial Revolution and its reliance on mining, drilling and burning fossil fuel was poisoning our planet, it shouldn’t have taken us nearly 100 years to start addressing the problem.  Who was in charge of that messaging?  War, hunger, bigotry, genocide, assault rifles for all, QAnon…why don’t the influencers who are promoting NASCAR, butter sculpture and $500 gym shoes turn their skills toward something a bit more existential?

I guess my point is that the bad guys/girls, (and there are so many bad, bad, bad, mostly guys), and the frivolous, why-does-anybody-give-a-shit guys/girls are way better at getting their crap out than the other side.  It seems preposterous that those standing up for the health of our planet, equality, democracy, peace and fairness always come off as whiners…like me.