A little chill in the air this morning, and bright blue skies greeting the day. The news of the world is bad. There are wars and rumors of wars, dishonesty, political subterfuge. If I watch the news, I can see more death and murder in a few minutes than the citizens of the Wild Wild West — of gunmen and range wars — saw in a lifetime.
I have to turn a little to find a bit of sky that isn’t crisscrossed with wires, mostly useless, that often seem to strangle downtown. Most of them are useless, I say, meaning they aren’t even in use anymore. The others are mostly useless too, because they bring in the news of the world, and the power to watch it. And worry.
Finally finding a bit of blue that isn’t occluded by waste-wires, I can breathe deeply and imagine, and my mind drifts back.
Someone standing on this spot in 1895, at this hour of the morning and at this temperature – the first really cool day of fall. I can imagine that.
I picked 1895 because according to our neighbors over at the Coleman newspaper, that was about the time in history when Brownwood stopped being a dirty den of gambling, drinking, and vice and started being a proper, pleasant town.
The Coleman paper might have been a bit judgmental, but we’ll allow it to make a point.
What did I have to worry about in 1895? There was a war between China and Japan. China lost control of Korea, and sometime that year some Japanese agents infiltrated Korea and murdered the Empress in her palace. They dragged her corpse outside and burned it in the yard. But I didn’t know about it.
Japan invaded Formosa (Taiwan) too, and a bunch of people got killed. But I didn’t know about it.
There was a famine in Russia that killed 400,000 or so, and that was the year Nicholas II became emperor and a little-known troublemaker named Vladimir Lenin was imprisoned and then exiled to Siberia. This would be the beginning, some would say, of what would eventually end up in the Russian Revolution – which would eventuate in about 100 million real human people being starved and murdered over the next forty years. But I didn’t know about it.
Twenty-two people were killed in a mill collapse in Germany, and fifteen were killed in a lifeboat disaster in Ireland. About a thousand died in an earthquake in Iran.
But these dead wires weren’t here, and they weren’t bringing all that news, and if I knew about it I might have cared, but what good would that do but to pile the worries and the costs and the misery of the world on me. Standing here far from everything, staring into the clear, beautiful, blue sky. I didn’t know, and I went on with my day in 1895 with my own life and worries, joys, and happiness, without the death and misery of the world strapped on my back.
Am I saying, “ignorance is bliss”? That’s a cop-out bunch of nonsense words usually used to avoid responsibility or blame. “Ignorance,” in that sense, means to choose not to know that which I already do or should know. But in 1895, I realized that I could not carry the worries of the world, nor was I designed to.
The news, social media, and every bit of information here in the height of the information age is designed to spread the misery. “Awareness” is the word that attaches the misery to YOU.
AWARENESS, as some universal lien on my mind, hadn’t yet been invented in 1895 when I was staring up at a clear blue sky on a bright, cool morning. Let me rephrase that for people who may not know the words. A “lien” is a debt attached to you (or anything you own) that you must pay in order to be free of it again. A “lien” on your mind is someone saying “Hey, let me let you know about this thing that is happening that you have no control over that is really bad and once you know about it, I expect you to either do something or feel really bad about it.”
And by “do something,” (says the one telling you that you MUST HAVE AWARENESS) I mean you must do “something that somehow benefits me or my cause.” Give money, wear this pin, post this flag in your bio, paste it on your car or your T-shirt, or petition your government to give us money, but most of all we’ll take money.
In the spiritual sense, the misery peddlers don’t always want money. Sometimes they just want you crushed and demoralized. Their pharmacy arm will medicate you as necessary.
Awareness in the modern sense is this… every disaster, every affliction, every sorrow, every disease, every misery, every injustice, every inequity, being heaped on people everywhere with the hope that they will imbibe it, breathe it in, strap it on their backs, carry it, and hopefully pay for it.
That seems cynical. But it is true.
But were we designed to carry every worry of the world? To haul that cross up a mountain and be crucified on it? No.
And now, to make it worse, they can fake it all. Deepfakes, false stories, war videos ripped from video games and passed off as real abominations. Why do you think there are atrocity videos readily available within minutes of every conflict or disaster? Lies, documented, to get countries into wars going back farther than WWI. Germans pretending to be Polish taking over a radio tower to precipitate Germany taking Poland. Public opinion. The sinking of the Maine. Go read what all we actually knew beforehand about Japan attacking Pearl Harbor. And now they can make a video and you can’t tell if it isn’t real. They have technology that (and this is a real story) can duplicate your daughter’s voice calling you and telling you that she’s been kidnapped when she hasn’t.
Theological, political, economic, and cultural misery peddlers need a moment of your time. You aren’t worrying enough.
If they tell you something is happening on the other side of the world, and you should be outraged… I wonder why they care if you care? And even if you care, what are you supposed to do about it? Worry? Pay? Worry and pay? And you cannot know, historically, if any of it is really true – because propaganda and agitation are the main intelligence aims in any conflict. And the technology exists to make you think you are talking to yourself on video. Really.
My point is (and you know I’d get there, didn’t you?) that maybe you weren’t designed to carry it all. In a time when intelligent people oughtn’t believe even their own eyes and ears when they are told by professional outrage pimps that they aren’t worrying enough, do you really need more burdens to carry? Who can you trust?
You better know. I know whom I have trusted.
Revelation 21:8 condemns a whole grocery list of the wicked, but the first and foremost is the “fearful.” Now you know why the world peddles fear all day every day. This blue sky doesn’t carry with it a debt I wasn’t meant to carry or pay, and I can breathe deeply knowing that the worries of the world are not all meant to be mine.
Let not your hearts be troubled. Love thy neighbor, too, if you get the chance.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.