“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”
Thomas Sowell
We live in a hashtag world. Not a day goes by where headline news lacks a story about something someone tweeted. Rarely does it lead to anything of real substance. The tweet itself is the story.
Thoughts abound in our current way of doing things but they seem to come at the expense of actual thinking. We message profusely on social media but rarely communicate. We readily speak in hashtags but obscure meaning. The hashtag is also the pound symbol and we use it to pound our lack of considered thought and clarity into the virtual atmosphere where it exists for all to see, like stars in the sky—visible, yet obscure. All the world is a stage and we are merely players in the world of internet performance art.
Hashtag conversations, shouted past one another or only to our own tribes are good for emotional distancing, not closeness. They don’t help us reach down for the humanity in ourselves and they certainly don’t help us recognize the humanity in others. In this bizarre decade of the 2020’s, we humans need to share our humanity more than ever. We need to connect. We need to listen to one another. We need to try to understand and show kindness. And we need to experience it.
In times of crisis, humans have the choice to build one another up by coming together or we can push one another away with banality. I pray that we choose the former.
Copyright by Daniel Blake, May 2023
reflections of a flawed man 