Seriously though, don't expect any cohesion.

I hope the name of this blog prevents you from thinking that I am going to offer any solutions to fix anything I will undoubtedly complain about. All I want to do is find a way to communicate how I see the world, which I have found to be very difficult. So difficult in fact that I have never really made a concerted effort to do so, and I will likely fail miserably. But the bottom line is this: Reality is complicated. Also this: I miss Walter Cronkite.

I accept the fact that everyone has to somehow make sense of the world they live in. Our ability to perceive our surroundings is traumatically limited. There is a lot going on in the world that we can't see, hear, feel, taste or smell at any one given moment, but that effects us in infinitely different ways, and we have to mentally construct some kind of system that accounts for it all. This is reality, well, your reality. However there is a different kind of reality; what is actually going on. I suppose most people project their reality onto real reality and so it doesn't really matter what real reality is like unless it directly effects them or at least they think it effects them. As a rule of thumb, whatever your reality is, it is much simpler that of actual reality, which isn't necessarily a problem, until you try to apply your reality to a situation that includes a greater degree of complexity than your reality currently comprises. When that occurs a lot of things can happen, but most likely you try to explain the added complexity in terms that already exist in your current reality. Changing your reality is probably not something you do everyday.

Simplifying complex events to fit into our understanding of the world can pose a lot of problems. Usually we take someone else's word for it, or we just look for things we understand and ignore what we don't. When we have to make decisions, often that effect other people, and our view of reality differs from actual reality which also differs from the reality of the people our decision effect, politics happens.

Still with me?

I have never actually watched Walter Cronkite when he was a News Anchor, but I miss the idea of Walter Cronkite. Today information on how the world actually works has never been more readily available. But that isn't necessarily a good thing, because bits and pieces of everyone else's reality make actual reality a lot harder to get to. There used to be, and presumably still are, people that dedicate their lives to filtering the good stuff for the rest of us, they are called journalists. They were not interested in the world as it should be, only in the way it is. Used to be they were the primary outlet for understanding the political world beyond our community. But now, mixed in with the people that had dedicated their lives to constructing a better picture of actual reality is an almost indistinguishable army dedicated to making your reality more like theirs, using what elements of actual reality they want and ignoring the rest. And it makes sense, as reality becomes more complicated, sifting out actual reality is more difficult. It is easier to sell a reality that is pre-constructed that filters out or interprets any contradictory information. These pre-constructed realities are called ideologies. Now my brain is tired.