Interpreting the news, coming to conclusions based on facts or one’s reading of the facts should at least try to maintain some level of scrutiny. One might disagree in some way, but there’s an attempt to keep the nature of its facts intact. Interpolating the news is the tool of those wishing to alter our perceptions of events and thus the facts surrounding them. Epistemological gymnastics, or fiddling with our understanding of truth, doggedly shadows our forward march. In plain terms, false facts can twist our perceptions often without our knowledge or recognition.

So how do we sort out what’s happening around us? In an era of facts becoming suspect, or non-existent, what we discern to be so may not be. “Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream ...” so the Gilbert and Sullivan song goes. Deception though has been buttressed with false certainties. You can fool most of the people some of the time. One party adheres to false narratives because they choose to remain isolated from the facts. Where they think this will automatically lead is a mystery. Some Valhalla? It’s phantom politics with a lethal price tag. Yet polls and local elections in the hinterlands point to collective amnesia and a dearth of any reasonable look ahead to what I call the results of unintended consequences.

We all live with these. We don’t really want to produce adverse effects through our thought and actions but we wobble through the day fending off the inscrutable and avoiding any challenges by the existential oblivion of our preconceived notions. We’re our own trap in other words. And to make matters worse, we’re bombarded with information we could very well do without. But the world is immense and the Universe isn’t listening. So what are we listening to? Is it the noise of the street, the repetitious droning of commercial incursion, the ego prompting us to accomplish more, or now whatever music we program into our iPads as we tune out our lives from the din of our surroundings, the flesh of human proximity.

A civilization without values cannot sustain the long haul of what it needs to do to survive the effects of abnegating its own complicity with the events it then decries. We need everyone to raise their hands and yell stop! The analysts and the commentators have become entertainers in this info glut and the salience of their observations is lost in the parade of events perpetrated by a society that prefers its toast buttered on both sides. One side isn’t enough. “I can’t believe it’s not butter” lovers can’t see it’s the same substitute on the other side. Just eat the damn toast and get on with it. People are suffering!

Someone said I was a cynic. Nothing is farther from the truth. Being observant is the provenance of anyone conscious of the best to which we might aspire. We live in a world still emerging from our eternal quest to tame the untamable, become a united force, an honor to the Universe writ large. For we have to think that big. We have to see our tiny journey as the mammoth undertaking that it is, not to induce any submission, but to understand the scale of our thoughts and their profound effects on all our surroundings, then of course ourselves.

If we are not in control of what we’re able to perceive as positive, versus what is destructive, we are no longer worthy of the great wealth we’ve been given. For it is truly the Commonwealth that sustains, ensures our future. The present climate shows us the limitations of our thoughts, political, personal, and ontological. Unknowing is no longer excusable. Our lives are consciousness, on all levels, and believing in that is exhilaration, freedom.

Alan Harris lives in Shelburne Falls.