To thine own self be true

TV news headline:
“Wildfire smoke can worsen asthma.”

What was and used to be common sense knowledge is now being reported as brand new information.

being unable to distinguish between truth and lies, and choosing in many cases to believe absolute crap, media sites–like tv networks–have allowed advertising to take over to the point one often can’t find the news amidst the ads.

A good example of this is CNN’s website which starts with news, then gives way to mostly advertising, confusing and distracting readers from the news of the day. All the above have made viewers more shallow, frivolous and noncritical viewers, consumers, and citizens.

Sting’s “Message in a Bottle” morphs to another level!

“Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral.”

Heck, is she just finding that out now? I remember listening to The Byrds back in 1969 (54 years ago) as they quite accurately sang back then:

“Change is now, change is now.
Things that seemed to be solid are not.”

Anne Frank 15
Tutankhaman 19                                                                                                                              Joan of Arc 19
Buddy Holly 22                                                                                                                                    Terry Fox 22                                                                                                                                      James Dean 24                                                                                                                                  Wilfred Owen 25                                                                                                                                  John Keats 26
Jimi Hendrix 27                                                                                                                                 Jim Morrison 27                                                                                                                                Percy Shelley 29                                                                                                                                Sylvia Plath 30                                                                                                                                Emily Bronte 30                                                                                                                              Franz Shubert 31                                                                                                                             Brian Epstein 32                                                                                                                                 Jesus Christ 33
Mozart 35                                                                                                                                     Marilyn Monroe 36
Lord Byron 36
Robert Burns 37
Raphael 37
Vincent van Gogh 37                                                                                                                Charlotte Bronte 38                                                                                                                     Chopin 39                                                                                                                                       Dylan Thomas 39
Martin Luther King, Jr. 39                                                                                                             John Lennon 40                                                                                                                              Franz Kafka 40
Jane Austen 42                                                                                                                                    RFK 42                                                                                                                                                    Elvis Presley 42
Chekhov 44
Oscar Wilde 46                                                                                                                                        JFK 46
Shakespeare 51
Descartes 53
Emily Dickinson 56                                                                                                                  Abraham Lincoln 56                                                                                                                    Rachel Carson 56
Beethoven 56                                                                                                                                    George Harrison 58
Charles Dickens 58                                                                                                                        Montaigne 59
Virginia Woolf 59                                                                                                                              Ernest Hemingway 61

Some of the many greats who died relatively young.

In our wonderful brave new world in which high-school students learn about financial planning, political correctness, and the environment, and university courses have become politicized and no longer highlight the major names of Western civilization, I wonder how many of the following geniuses and greats are actually known today and/or will be forgotten by subsequent generations.

Aquinas
Aristotle
Bach
Beethoven
Ingmar Bergman
Blake
Rachel Carson
Cervantes
Charlemagne
Chekhov
Constable
da Vinci
Dante
Darwin
Descartes
Dickens
Dickinson
Durer
Einstein
Erasmus
Galileo
Goethe
Goya
Handel
Stephen Hawking
Homer (not Simpson)
Ibsen
Kurosawa
Martin Luther
Martin Luther King
Nelson Mandela
Michelangelo
Monet
Montaigne
Thomas More
Newton
Picasso
Plato
Raphael
Rembrandt
Renoir
Rodin
St. Francis of Assisi
Shakespeare
Shaw
Tchaikovsky
Tolstoy
Turner
Van Gogh
Voltaire
Orson Welles
Whitman
Wordsworth
Woolf
Yeats
Vermeer
Frank Lloyd Wright

Well, the great dumbing-down is now going flat-out. So much for subject matter of consequence, ideas, history, serious critical thinking, philosophizing, and depth. Who are the heroes of our time and the great people of our age? How do their contributions contribute significantly to our knowledge, understandings, and appreciations of Life, human nature, Truth, Beauty, and wisdom? How much poorer/shallower/dumber are a people who do not know who these above greats of Western civilization are!

(background: I co-edited 6 collections of short stories with supporting information about the elements of fiction/short story terminology.)

If you stop and think about it, our lives are like stories or novels and contain many of the fictional elements below:

antagonist
antecedent action
anticlimax
antihero
atmosphere/mood
character (including characters, characters’ characters, static and dynamic characters)
climax
complicating incident/complication
confidant/e
conflicts (vs. self, others, social environment, nature)
contrast
crisis
dialogue
dilemma
epiphany
episode
exposition
falling action
fantasy
foil/character foil
foreshadowing
goal/motivation
images
in media res
irony (situational irony, verbal irony, dramatic irony)
juxtaposition
local color
moral
narrative (having plot, conflict, characters, settings, points of view)
plot
predicament
protagonist
purpose
rising action
romance
setting
stream-of-consciousness
style
subplot
surprise ending
suspense
symbol
theme
universality
vicarious experience

Uttered by George Santos comparing himself to Rosa Parks.

“There will be time to murder and create.”
(“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)

A very exact, precise statement on human nature and behavior methinks. Both ends of the human continuum.
A very similar powerful statement on a par with Shakespeare’s dualistic view stated by Hamlet.

“[M]urder” and “create” have many connotations, too, that expand the possible meanings and nuances of this very concise statement.

Another great Eliot/Prufrock line:

Curiosity can get obsessive and, once on this narrow track, people will stop at absolutely nothing to find out or get the answers to something. A yearning very difficult to waylay or delay.