APRIL FOOLS! (rabbit rabbit)

26 of 40

It is April 1. In the analog archive, any number of hoaxes were perpetrated to great good freak out (like this from 1965).

Now every day is April Fools.

The InterWebNet offers hourly Onion, Babylon Bee, self-made memes every few minutes on the screen, 24/7. The joy of shock is over for the incidental farce in media.

Farce is now expected, often hilarious, but often swiped away in non-plused boredom.

In the Analog World, now a full generation ago, the linear life of receiving information on separate trays of newspaper, TV, radio, magazine, isolated and filtered everything. The day of the month meant more because we had work week and weekend media. And lives.

I searched “April Fools” on Google, and found many sites, images, commentary. All before the 21st century. We have lost something.

I think this latest change of the Internet is reprogramming our brains. I know what my first 40 years were without the Internet, but I do wish I knew what life was like before any mass media. Icebergs of info must have come from visitors who saw, heard and repeated things. Weeks would go by and the only news was what was for dinner and the weather.

We were at the mercy of our ignorance. Maybe it was bliss. I think not.

The unrelenting drudge of being your own machine for living always had the specter of ill health, as understood as the weather, looming over everything. Nearly everything serious was fatal.

God was both vengeful and killing and redemptive and saving. There were few adjectives let alone adverbs. It was easier. It was either hopeless in your incapacity or hope filled as that was the only capacity to cope beyond hard work that you had.

You were controlled by those who knew more, even tinier than today’s 2%. They had money, knowledge, power. But they had no more understanding than you. Death was not abated by leeches. The weather just happened. Everyone took the stairs.

God must have been a necessary coping mechanism. Something had to be controlling this. It was too complex, too overwhelming not to think that the miracle of birth, abating disease, eating, loving had to come from somewhere. And the dark of death, the pain, the completely unknowable source of misery and loss had to have a reason.

My guess is we are beginning to know enough that the Modern Era, where “Smell-o-Vision” was a hilarious hoax is jumping the shark. We are at the dawn of the New Ignorance. The impassable knowledge gaps of every reason for every cause and effect are waiting. We see inside our bodies. We know where weather is coming from. We know, really know how most every one dies.

But we still cannot know what the weather will be at 12:08 tomorrow. We still do not know how the force of gravity actually works. We continue to guess, wrongly, about what dark matter is, what our DNA is, what caffeine, fat, red wine, sleep, cholesterol actually do to us. Despite huge efforts and instant updates.

This may be the dawning of an era that realizes the New Ignorance.

We walked through the door that broke the code on what are bodies are made of, but when I asked a great doctor about fighting disease, he shrugged and said “We put each patient in the best place we can where the body then cures itself. We do not know how to do what the body does.”

We have eliminated the middleman of not knowing some things to the point where that the ignorance that remains has grown enormously. We are beginning to know what we don’t know.

Although I have unsought faith in something more than this, I have no understanding of God. I get that 2,000 years ago one of us was killed because he had broken the code of ignorance, too. He was somewhere I cannot be, no one else was either (though there were a host of others trying).

In Lent I think of the break from an inexplicable life that Jesus showed and offered to anyone willing to see. It was deadly to him. The ignorance of those he encountered were in a place just like we were in the analogue world, The now incorrect “BC” world had no clue beyond hope that their blind drudgery had a future. Jesus was a break in the controlling power of ignorance.

Whether belief beyond what you know is possible, you do it every day. When I lost all balance for a week two years ago, I was not dizzy, or disoriented, or afraid, even confused. A thing I had full faith in, gravity, in my movement simply went away.

The center of the earth that draws me vertical every day was simply gone. There was no “Smell-o-Vision”, neither I, nor the best doctors with the best technology in the world could simply apply some of that technology and fix me.

We let God do that.

He (or She, or Whatever) did a good job, too.

Part of the job of giving life will be its end, too. 2,000 yeas ago that end changed things.