This is the Dawning of the Age of Nefarious

I want my money back.  The singing group "The Fifth Dimension" promised us in 1969 that this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius(AOA). Technically speaking, you have Eras (i.e. Mesozoic Era) Periods (i.e. Jurassic Period) followed by Epochs (i.e. Early Jurassic Epoch), etc.  Another word for Era is Age!  Mesozoic Era is Latin for Age of the Reptiles.  The damned thing lasted 186 million years.  The Temptations boasted that love was supposed to guide the stars for an age.  Lets go conservative here and say that an age is at least a minimum 100 million years.  Fact of the matter is that we got maybe ten years of love and 186 million years of giant freaking lizards?  How is that fair?  Even astrologists said we were supposed to get 2,160 years of peace and love. Instead, we now find our world entering into the Age of Nefarious (AON), and to tell you the truth, I pray it ends before it ever climbs out of the cradle to spread its corporate message to mankind.

This is a world turned upside down. The AOA promise came after the darkest parts of the Cold War when we were told by leaders of both political parties that there was a communist lurking behind every tree and in every woodpile. I remember watching propaganda films in school of bald headed Russian children in uniform swearing allegiance to the flag of the Soviet Union, replete with its symbol of all that was unholy, the hammer and sickle.  We were fighting communists in the Korean War and in the Vietnam War.  We had witch hunts in Congress over finding communist sympathizers.  Nothing could be worse than being a communist and we were taught the phrase, "Better dead than red."  The Hippies and the war- weary children of the draft stood up and said that they had experienced enough of that message and the AOA was their vision...only it was never to be.

We are entering into an age where facts do not seem to matter.  Our leaders are all well versed in the art of leadership by news cycle.  Hyperbole is the coin of the realm. Twitter has replaced thoughtful editorial opinion.  Experience is a hindrance to successful governance. That whirring sound that you hear in the background is coming from the graveyards where millions of bodies from my father's generation are spinning at the news that a foreign country has been shown to have involved itself in a United State’s presidential election, the outcome of which was razor thin, if not disputable by the popular vote. They would be asking themselves for what principles did they make such great sacrifices. 

If you think that I am making some partisan pitch here and condemning the Republicans for bringing us a President Trump, I can assure you I am not.  The Democrats outnumber conservatives in this nation by a wide margin and they are the ones who did not stand up for what they say they believe in.  No, this AON is the result of people on both sides of the political aisle becoming intellectually dull and lazy.  We do not want to go the extra mile to find the truth of a situation, preferring instead information that assuages what we want to believe no matter how ridiculous it is.  We no longer read the whole article, check the source or even the date.  We have become the generation that only reads the headlines, be they true or false.

Few people today actually understand the oppression that caused our nation to be formed.  Our grievances today are more likely to be centered around poor cell phone coverage or not being able to sleep because of a barking dog. Our forefathers dealt with an occupying force that would toss you out of your own farmhouse, slaughter your livestock and have their way with your wife and daughters. That is the definition of false equivalence. False equivalence is the tool that the masterminds in corporate media and our political parties use to fire up the masses to vote.  Misplaced anger sends us to the polls in numbers far less than what they should be because our leaders know that in this age of intellectual apathy (AON), only the "pissed off" will ever show up to the polls...and that they are the easiest to control.

So do I really want my $3.99 back?  Not really.  I just want our country and the world to be a place where all men are created equal; a place where my neighbor values me not by the color of my skin or my political affiliation but rather by my desire to have open and tolerant dialogue about any issue under the sun.  - Acceptance, diversity and people who constantly strive for truths -  I will just listen to the Fifth Dimension and dream of what might have been.