Baffled

I am baffled.  That means I am totally bewildered by the current political, religious and social milieu.  I am mystified, confused, and confounded by what is happening in my country (and your country), in Christian and other religious communities, and in society (and the world) in general.  I find it all incomprehensible. 

It is baffling to me when we (as a people) allow the claim that truth (eventful and factual matter) does not exist.  It bewilders me when the truth is usurped and displaced by a self-serving version of events or facts through distortion, outright falsehood (even when captured in both writing and on video), manipulation, exaggeration, evasion, and fabrication. If I can discern this happening at the highest levels of power, if I can hear it and see it and know it, why can’t others? This inability of “others” to hear it and see it and to know it, is more baffling to me than any of the distortions and denials of truth that are currently in vogue. 

I am baffled by what William Stringfellow (using Orwell’s “1984”) called “doublespeak and overtalk.”  By the distortion of language (and the continual repetition of the same)  through the use of jargon, slogans, and the inversion of definitions, our minds are being crippled and/or immobilized (baffled).  We are being deluded and we seem unable to hear it, see it, or know it.

It is wholly baffling to me that we allow one person to boast of expertise in all things (without any evidence or demonstration of that expertise either in the past or in the present) to hold sway over our rule of law and our democracy.  It is the very antithesis of what our founding fathers sought to create.  I hear it and see it and know it and I am bewildered by the fact that others do not, cannot, or don’t care.

I am baffled that we have permitted and continue to permit the cursing of human beings who resist the idea that truth is nonexistent, and who resent and confront the lies, and who challenge the “doublespeak” and the blatant boasting.  The official defamation of these persons is one thing, but for us to allow it, condone it, and accept it as the normal way of dealing with those who think differently blows my mind.  I am baffled.