Summer lightning is making a jigsaw puzzle of the noir sky as I write this. Not a storm to be ignored. You can smell the ozone. The residue of thunder has plugged both my ears as if an echo froze there, and if I swallow to clear them, I taste something metallic in the back of my throat. Even the lake behind my house has whitecaps. When the Sturm and Drang passes, I’ll go out on the trail and listen to the tympani of branches dripping diamonds with elfin innocence as if it never happened.

Life is like that. Time spends itself on your shores with gentle rushes that promise eternity, but then the elements conspire into turbulent breakers and even tsunamis. Makes it tough to trust the weather. Thing to learn is that every aspect of life seeks balance. Remember that word, please – balance – while I wander among the stars for a moment.

Some scientists describe the universe as chaos. True enough, when you see anything less than the whole. The universe appears violent, random and unpredictable. But telescopes are really only microscopes in that they cannot capture the entirety of infinity and eternity. Whenever we stumble in our Theories of Everything (TOEs), the corrections are always equations that reveal balance, a trade-off. Some exchange between matter and energy is discovered, setting the clockwork right, and all is well in the firmament again. The scale of it is simply too macrocosmic to be grasped by our crude tools and limited minds.  

So, what’s the point, if ultimate truth is always beyond our comprehension? What can we derive from a balance that is utterly outside our frame of reference? Fortunately, the cosmic maze leaves breadcrumbs everywhere for us to follow. We work it out crumb by crumb in Newtonian physics or Euclidean geometry, and at least theoretically in things like Quantum and modular math. And even at the Lilliputian level of mortal events, we say something is karma, fate, destiny, serendipity, chance, providence – a way of shrugging our shoulders and acknowledging a neatness of balance. Equilibrium, it seems, can be achieved through an inscrutable hiccup that brings the universe back to its grand design of perfect balance.

As part of nature, we seek balance every day. It is innate in our genes. Our physical health and psychological well-being depend on it in love, sex, commerce and social relationships. When balance is thrown out of whack, we instinctively claw our way toward equilibrium.

2020 has been a bad year for stability: a year of global pandemic coming out of China…the culmination in a bitter presidential election of four years of serial political intrigues and mayhem…relentless media spin…mass hysteria and anarchy. It is very much like the universe seen through the tunnel vision of a telescope or the emotional near-sightedness of humans.

So, when balance is restored what will it look like?

Will it be a swing in the pendulum of civilizations? Will it be the end of a Golden Age in America, the end of a relative Pax Romana globally? Will it be an affirmation of America’s foundations? Will it be capitulation to media-driven indoctrination as a de facto government, or the herald of technological masters (AI) as was foreseen by Orwell, Huxley and others?

Increasingly in modern times, when radical change happens it comes through soft coups fed by information control and indoctrination. Freedom of expression, therefore, is the biggest obstacle to a controlled society, because its overthrow requires people who have that freedom to be fooled into giving it up. If it happens, it happens by degrees. The old metaphor of boiling an unwary frog in a pan of water by slowly increasing the temperature applies. It takes ignorance or gullibility on the part of a population combined with complicity by those who control the spread of information a long time to pull it off. Generations, in fact. It must infect the three aspects of governance that all aspiring leaderships, whether dictators seizing sudden control or by frog-boiling partisans over generations, seek to monopolize: Education, the Media and the Judicial.

As Lincoln once said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time…” Increasingly easy to do that with today’s slick and seditious media. Thinking is difficult; feeling is easy. Indoctrinate long enough with a message and it becomes a feeling which most of us never really think about again. We simply remember our feeling. When the message is refuted or discredited, it is too late to change its impact because it is now a feeling orphaned from its origins. So, if you can sell an idea with simple generalizations to the point where it becomes a one-size-fits-all feeling, you are home free. Thus, diverse populations become monolithic in media and classroom portrayals. For example, we don’t think of Blacks as the intricate range of people they are from all walks of life, all values, all political ideologies, all degrees of success and a burgeoning middle class. The media-educational complex presents them as a single disadvantaged group doomed by racism to high crime rates, educational deficits and broken families – a pick-and-choose demographic that ignores and falsifies the reality of rising Blacks with middle-class values.

It is the image that is broken, the monolithic image that is incomplete and inherently suppressive in a racist way. Low expectations have crippled generations of young people of color. High expectations instill confidence, provide motivation, and confer self-respect. Minority young people who have understood that and have rejected crippling cultural cues about everlasting victimhood are the ones who are building a solid Black middle class. On the other end, minority young people who have immersed themselves in negative cultural values have higher rates of crime, drug use, unwed pregnancies, broken families and educational deficits than Blacks did in the Great Depression! Despite 90 years of greater overall opportunity, those young people are going backwards! As an example, in 2019 not a single black student in Baltimore’s 13 urban high schools was proficient in math and only 1 out of 10 black males in reading. Enslaved by a cultural mindset, they are being lost to the achievements of mainstream Black America.

The same monolithic lumping has been used for feminism, sexual orientation, illegal immigrants and native Americans. Victimhood should never become a permanent address. It is a crown of thorns that will slowly bleed out those who wear it into perpetuity. What subtext would you take from cradle-born messages that someone or something is keeping you from achievement? Wouldn’t it make you wonder “why do I need an excuse?” An excuse for what? The built-in premise of inferiority would drive deep into your soul. I am encouraged by how many well-functioning people of color are coming to understand this; and struck by how many well-meaning but “un-woke” young white people do not. It is eerily like the 60s when the Patty Hearsts and the Bernadine Dohrns were espousing violent revolution. This is a time for strength and calm reflection as we face the inevitable surge of pre-election manipulation, ruses and incitement to violence. 

Photos below – #1 my chilluns; #2 kayaking; #3 Sully, Moose and Bruce; #4-7 more kayaking; #8-10 my dad (the woman in the white blouse is probably my grandmother who died when my dad was 6); #11 in case you miss snow; and I’ll use the following FaceBook post I made to explain #12:

Years ago I used to make kickboards for swimmers. The India ink drawings were usually customized to things we kidded about or personal identifications. My connections spanned from the classroom to informal swimming workouts of which I was part. No one thought of it as a statement of diversity, but lots of cross-cultural fun was had by all, and no one was offended. They came by public bus, hitchhiked, drove or were dropped off, rich and poor, inner city or suburban. At one time the mix included blacks, Arabs, Jews, Hispanics and whites –lots of kickboards! And lots of rewards to me with no political correctness, BS or consciousness of social motives. I remember a young black swimmer named Curtis Tate who had sewn his own tux for prom making me a “dashiki.” And the rewards continue, lo, these six decades later when every now and then someone sends me a photo of their kickboard. That’s what David “BirdMan” Weinstein just sent me from Israel! A pigeon once targeted him when we were all working out, hence the kickboard theme of hiding under his towel with bird droppings and feathers floating down. I’m not an activist, an apologist or a do-gooder. But I try not to cripple people with low expectations, which to me is the heart of disrespect and subconscious racism. No emotional conditioning, knee-jerk hates, feel-good compassion, or sanctimony. Love is quiet and individualized; hate is loud and socialized. I have high expectations for people I come in contact with, and they almost always fulfill them…

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan