And October is going to tank for the next two weeks with more snow to come. Remember how fall used to be in these parts?
So, let me get this straight. Our summers will now be smoky write-offs, dangerous to health. Our falls are non-existent now. Rainy and cold. Winters will be longer. Springs?
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Good news for local shopping centres and stores. People frustrated and limited by nature going more to shop. I know that screen entertainment will likely go up in use as people hunker down indoors. Already we’ve seen what’s become of kids in the summer as well as after school-hours. They stay inside at home and watch screens. As do parents after the workday. Watching the idiot box, now with more ‘boxes’ to choose from including phones. When I go for a walk after supper, that is what I see in the neighborhood. TV lights from windows everywhere.
The same lights that once flickered from windows of my childhood neighborhood as I went from house to house once a week in the evenings to collect for my paper route five memorable years. As I passed houses, the main light was often a tv screen as source. When I was invited inside a house to come in from the cold, inevitably a tv would be blaring inside. Evenings are the time for prairie homes to be centered on tv viewing. If I was still collecting today, people would come to the doors talking on phones, kids would be walking around with tablets and adults might be sitting at laptops. More screens than ever.
That is what the technology companies figured out. They only had to keep putting out screens to the converted, to create a profitable, no-brainer (literally) market of brainwashed, hooked kids and grown-ups. A complete tech takeover. And the masses would mindlessly follow with barely a whimper. Sort of like Animal Farm.
Today being, becoming, and remaining an individual remains the most important remnant of what Orwell called ‘ownlife’ in Nineteen-Eighty-four. One has to look after own’s own life, mind, feelings, spirit, and soul. These cannot be entrusted to others who generally morph down to what we used to call The Machine in the sixties. The Machine will just use you and take your money. It will never love you no matter what the technocrats profess.
This means that you must, fundamentally, take responsibility for yourself and not blame others, claiming easy victimhood. It means that you must create your own life, follow your own bliss, and remain true to your best. It means not being distracted by the Machine and failing Nature, and being able to distract yourself by such things as novel reading, seeking out the best available arts and Nature (you may have to leave town). You also need to keep filling up yourself with new information, critically think for yourself, and educate yourself and your imagination (as Northrop Frye suggested). It all comes down to you, your choices, your value system, and your best dreams and plans.
