The Distance between Bullshit and Me
by Doug Rose

Once we clearly see everything as it really is, we will more easily figure out exactly what needs to be fixed and how to fix it, is Doug's sage advice

This hasn’t been humanity’s best couple of years. It has left many of us feeling like Helen Keller trying to work a Rubik’s Cube. Repeating popular rumour, the guess-work of friends, or personal views about it all seems pointless but I have to do just a bit of that to set the backdrop. I apologize.

I am one of the many fools that forms subjective opinions around what might be better left as objective observations. I have to try to be a little more objective. There are so very many different opinions among us! Our species is more socially disjointed than ever before. There seems to be only one thing that almost everyone agrees on. We have all reluctantly realized that many of our commonly accepted pillars of stability are built on a foundation of nonsense and most of our life-long sources of supposedly true information are slanted, if not lying. Entities we always thought of as honest have proven themselves unreliable and lacking integrity. To paraphrase Michelle Wolf’s brilliant line at the Washington Correspondents Dinner. “Congratulations to you all who like to bring us the breaking news! You finally broke it!”

To add insult to injury, we have been forced to admit that many of these formerly thought-to-be-trustworthy sources, through either intent or ignorance, have been feeding us a lot of bullshit for a very long time—and we have been believing much of it.

But so-called News is just the catalytic tip of the iceberg. By now, bullshit runs through so much of our social structure that very few havens are safe from it. Among the many opinions we build for ourselves, from the shrapnel and shards of all this ca-ca, the fastest growing one may be a backlash reaction. Realizations that we have been so blatantly and painfully betrayed by government and media have inspired many to think that there is no viral disease at all, and that the “scamdemic" is just a government plot. Nobody seems to know just which government is responsible but the theories run

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from America, to China, to America and China working together, to the whole United Nations organization, to...the list of suspects goes on and on. What seems to be the soundest of these opinions says that the governing forces behind this alleged bacterial/theatrical production aren’t really national governments at all but rather the banking, oil & energy, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, weapons, and other assorted industrial manufacturers and business interests that operate in the shadows of, and pull the strings attached to, all governments. Many of these industries are already well known for their dark history of profiting from human misery.

Folks on the opposite end of our popular opinion’s pendulum believe that no intentional mismanagement is being performed and no known misinformation is being circulated by the media, any government, or corporate despots. They say that conspiracy theory kooks are just ignoring the very simple truth of virus-as-sole-enemy and that many are also ignoring the salvation available to us all from (albeit insufficiently tested) vaccines. Opinions in this camp vary as to whether the virus itself is an angry revenge of Nature, a flubbed experiment done by sloppy scientists, a purposeful manufacture of unscrupulous humans, or the result of a bat having sex with a chicken.

There is a third contingent. I am in it. Like other members of this growing third contingent, I’m sure that I have no totally clear picture of what is going on. I am aware that my opinions are not facts—but three foggily obvious things have been objectively observed by myself and my fellow third contingent peeps. The first is that whether this bug is an ordinary flu exaggerated by media or a potentially apocalyptic new superbug, a form of virus exists. It can be a danger, and even deadly, to a small percentage of the population. The second is that there is an attempt being made by sociopathic multinational interests to bring humanity to its knees under their tightened control. Tough guys have been beating up peaceful kids and stealing their lunch money since the beginning of people. Our modern incorporated bullies have a much greater avarice and ambition inspiring them, and much greater resources and technology at their disposal. The third is that the former is being manipulated

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by the latter to accomplish their purpose. It appears to many of us that the long-range effects of this selfish profiteering and criminal socio-economic engineering could become more detrimental to humanity than the historical Bubonic plague was, or the new virus is. Regardless of whichever set of causal details you believe, the effects are obvious to everyone. Besides the more obvious effects are subtler ones that have fostered a near-universal stress and drained vast reservoirs of happiness. Some of us have been overcome by panic, come apart at the seams, and lost our centre—if we ever had one. Many among this wobbly-cantered segment of humanity have bowed to a media manipulation of one flavour or another. They have become psychologically and physically compliant with questionable sources of information and direction. This unfortunate group of folks believe nearly everything that confirms their fears and opinions. They worry a lot. These people are most likely to get sick, most likely to die, and vulnerable to being used and abused in many other ways even while they are healthy and alive.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel-vision! The unanimous opinion of logical folks from all three contingents says that regardless of what caused the problems, our time would be best spent in activity that assists in repairing them. Who is right or wrong matters a lot less than what we are going to do about fixing everything that is broken. Common sense dictates that the only things that matter now are things that help. A single minute of constructive action is worth much more than a year of spouting one-sided rhetoric or ignoring the circumstances. The question many people are asking is, “How can I do something constructive and helpful when my hands are tied by these terrible events?” The answer is easy. Our hands are not tied. Our minds are. Thinking your hands are tied is a blatantly fallacious, premature, subjective and reactive cognitive mental commitment. Put more simply, it is bullshit. It is our bullshit now. It may have originally come from elsewhere but we gave it permission to stay. When people allow their hands to be tied and their minds to be controlled by forces outside of their hands and minds, they are surrendering part of their humanity to external coercion. They are thereby, at least partially, becoming slaves to someone else’s bullshit. There’s a lot of bullshit in the world. Our odds of being exposed to this bullshit increase as we get more directly dependent upon other people. Human beings are very interdependent animals. No one can completely avoid interdependence, therefore no one completely avoids bullshit, either. The world smells worse in some places than others but everyone is going to get a little bit of stank on themselves while living here. Luckily, we can also find as much wisdom and kindness as we want to look for. Vast amounts of those qualities are available, although the good news rarely makes the front page. Whether the monsters attacking life on Earth are bacterial, governmental, corporate, manufactured, demonic, natural, or a combination of all these, most of what they do is beyond our individual control. On the other hand, our reactions to what they do are totally within our own control. Our reactions will be the deciding factor in our future domination by or liberation from those monsters.

Our present-tense happiness and the future of our species largely depends upon whether we surrender to bullshit or deal with real shit. There is a space, as massive as you want to make it, between external coercion and internal direction. That space is the exact distance between bullshit and me. All of the programmed fears that are ground into our psyches could result in unhappiness, illness, and even death—but only if we allow them to do so. They cannot stop we humans from being humane, resilient, intelligent, healthy, kind, and strong if we find it worth the effort it takes to maintain our relationship with those characteristics. Everyone alive has the ability to transcend bullshit and do something that helps fix real shit. Some folks don’t bother because they think they are only capable of small, meaningless contributions. They don’t realize that the smallest things often make the biggest difference. Every time we speak kindly and show patience instead of reacting with anger; whenever we go a little bit out of our way to help someone else in any fashion, we add meaning and power to what seem like the bigger, more important actions. Little things often coagulate and conglomerate to form big ones. Without small things, big things do not happen. Gandhi could not have done his salt march to the ocean and raised a nation by himself. Martin Luther King, if working by himself, would have been lynched or ignored at his first campaign. Any great person you can think of had many other folks involved in making their effect so great. We consider Gandhi, Dr King, and others like them to be our heroes. They considered all the historically nameless people who were imprisoned, abused, beaten, and even killed during those popular movements to be the real heroes! Each of us seemingly less influential people can not only make some valuable contributions to life on Earth but we can help others to do the same. Again, small actions can have great impact.

Just an encouraging word or small kindness can stand a person’s attitude up tall enough to make sure that their best qualities rise and function that day. Many people who feel powerless to help have no idea how powerful the effects of a simple hug can be. Besides benefitting the recipient of any constructive action, and the collective well-being of the whole world at large, there is also a well-documented, bi-directional effect to any positive effort. Doing a kindness always boosts the person doing it as much as it boosts up the person they are directing it toward. I have friends that are actively working for women’s rights, health, and empowerment. I have other friends that are working to feed starving people that have been frozen out of their employment by the events of recent years. Other friends are monks, nuns, witches, priests, shamans, and adepts of other spiritual practices that send positive energies and aspirations into the more esoteric world every day. They also act in a kind manner to everyone they meet in the physical world. But most of my friends make very effective effort to keep themselves and those around them as happy and healthy as possible without employing monk-style austerity and discipline, or shamanic ritual. They have blended helpful physical actions and constructive, upbeat mental directions into their everyday way of living. Everyone around them can feel it and benefit.

I am pretty lazy, but I do have one important job. I try to be nice. It doesn’t always work. When I am not nice, I try to stay aware enough of that fact to catch my self-broadcasting bullshit as quickly as possible. This always diminishes the number as well as the longevity of my screw-ups. It insures that I don’t act like a jackass as often this year as I did last year. This is an important part of maintaining the distance between a different type of bullshit and me. In this case, not culturally-influenced but rather my own internally-generated bullshit. I try to stay cantered away from bullshit, whether it comes from inside or out. I don’t rent out space in my head to bullshit. I’m not going to argue with bullshit. I give bullshit as little as possible of my attention. From my own ignorant, open-to-all-possibilities, altruism-as-common-sense home base, I remember that the better aspects of what I want myself to be are more important than what any negative influence wants.

People think of bullshit the same way they think of the good stuff—always looking for the big, impressive pieces. Sometimes smaller and more commonly accepted bits of bullshit are a lot more influential than we realize. The most inane and seemingly harmless bullshit will still steal our attention and time away from doing a much more constructive good. A lot of nonsense can snare our attention away from things that desperately need it. Keeping up with the sexual tension scripted between immature fictional TV couples or watching some other crap-on-a-screen in order to vacantly fill time probably deserves a little bit less of our attention until the more pressing ills of humanity are cured.

My greatest hope and wish is that all eight billion people on Earth remember that it is worth every effort necessary to put some distance between yourself and bullshit—and if you should find yourself accidentally swimming in Bullshit Lake, don’t bite on any hooks there! Fish don’t end up in the frying pan if they refuse to take the bait. There is always a shore nearby. You can swim to a place where you can shower off and very quickly restore yourself to a more no-bullshit, happy, healthy, constructive, and helpful life. That shore is where the party can happen.

So as you can see, the idea behind all this is simple. Once bullshit and its residual effects are eliminated from our minds, only what is real will be left. Once we clearly see everything as it really is, we will more easily figure out exactly what needs to be fixed and how to fix it. With the intelligence and direction that such clear vision affords, we will happily put in the effort to accomplish a saner, safer, and much more joyful world. That’s when the party will happen.