Listen to the silence. If the trees weren’t already naked, you could hear a leaf drop. Is there a silence as golden as the one that follows the exasperating clamor of the last year? Even the squirrels are done with their holiday shopping for nuts, the birds are enroute on their off-season travels, and whatever hunkers down for winter has hunkered. So, now the great silent cleanse. That first snowflake is going to sound like a bowling ball.

It’s not an end to divisiveness, but it is a pause from insanity, as if everyone passed out at the height of a party (put a capital “P” on whichever Party you deem drives the irrationality). And as with the long night of any madhouse party, we awaken to clean up a mess.

Will we ever go back to a time when you couldn’t tell a reporter’s politics? Will schools return to teaching young minds how to think rather than what to think? Will journalism curriculums reclaim their sacred trust of impartiality as a cornerstone, as opposed to the crusade of political mission that inflates them now and their debate over whether both major parties deserve equal coverage?

‘Fraid that ship sailed in the 60s when media, with no grass roots impetus to do so, began to advertise themselves on billboards and build throne rooms for quartets of celebrity journalists arrayed on daises in pecking orders. Unabashed self-promotion, competitive ratings and soaring salaries followed. You might have laughed in the 50s at the idea that news coverage would vary sharply from station to station with major stories ignored and minor ones magnified. Now that contrast is exactly what draws or repels an audience, and no one is laughing. “News” has become weaponized “entertainment.”

We have returned to the village well, where gossip, titillation and sensationalism draw the most enthusiastic audiences. It’s in our genes. Shock, passing judgment, salaciousness, self-righteous anger, fear – all calculated to dial up our maximum voltage. Adrenaline is never more potent than when it floods the herd instinct that drives us. Stampede! Stand back far enough and you will see that the drivers of cultures and generations are dominated by the power of suggestion and mass hysteria. How else to explain cultural imperatives like wearing blue jeans so that the wearer must side-stride shuffle to keep them from falling off? Or how else to unpack the demand to fire professors who won’t recant their belief that there are only two biological sexes? Salem witch trials. The Inquisition. Societal hysteria reformulated for the tortured logic of 2022.

How to disarm? We are ideological tribes, steeped in rites of mind control, dancing around our fires of indignation, hurling spears made of pointed phrases and venomous smears. Our technologies are channeling Machiavelli and Orwell. If there is a way out, it must surely involve undoing the emotional conditioning and the stupefying brainwashing at every cultural level of our society from education to entertainment. And that is the key word: entertainment.

As a writer, I am part of the entertainment industry, a cultural shill for my own messages. And I understand that effective entertainment must tap into emotions like laughter, fear, anger and – perhaps most of all – sympathy/empathy. We all want to be compassionate. The hue and cry of the underdog (or whatever you can mis-portray as the underdog) will always stir compassion, and deservedly so at an appropriate level. But media knows no bounds when it comes to exploiting that emotion. It magnifies victimhood and injustice, it fans fear, infers guilt, and gins up outrage. The irony is that, as our formerly objective news dwindles further into entertainment, the larger victimhood is the victimization of the audience that is being played to the extent we are being played today. E.g.: education, sources of information, the arts (TV, print, music, theater, graphic, film, games, etc) – you know the word – medias. We are awash with politically correct themes in the arts, however thinly veiled and dominant they may be from political pitches like “Madam Chairman” and “The West Wing” to late-night TV with its relentless demonizing.

And so, I’m dismayed at how narrowly our society sources news. Why don’t we seek daily information across the spectrum for balance? Even if it had no bias, media news selects and edits what it deems important. That tunnel vision alone insures polarization. We talk of civil discourse on issues, but meaningful discussions are quite impossible if neither side fully knows where the other side is coming from. Yes, some give token lip service to broad sourcing of information, but invariably the people who claim they listen to both sides rely on caricatures or occasional exposure to know what’s across the aisle. That’s like trying to grasp something with wings flying past your window. And there is a natural imbalance, because liberal media saturates our culture; meaning conservatives are much more likely to know what liberals are fed than liberals know what conservatives say. Unless someone on the Left has heard conservative radio/TV coverage daily for years on issues that liberal media ignores, including lengthy interviews with relevant figures, they simply have no basis for debate. And to a lesser extent, there are isolated Right wingers who access very little culture or entertainment of any kind, but faithfully listen to a narrow selection of conservative sources. Common ground. It won’t be found at the outer extremes, but seeing them both will help you find the middle. To see only one is like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together with only half the pieces.

The many moods of autumn were on full display the last month. From Indian summer to a hint of snow to a beaver dam to a golden field to embering foliage to inky clouds stuttering across the sky to a brash full moon, a dozen photos this month caught the sample offered below…

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan