On Common Sense

My brother sent us two gifts this week -- one wrapped for Christmas, and one unwrapped to use sooner if we needed it. The unwrapped gift was a hand crank radio and flashlight for emergencies. Earlier in the week he had sent the text "Just FYI, make sure you have a 15 day supply of non perishable food and bottled water by Thursday, December 17th. Hopefully no big deal, but in case there is another unexpected run on supplies over the next few weeks, you want to be prepared." When I asked him what was special about the 17th, he said "Definitely recommend stocking as much water as you need for 15 days. I had a dream earlier this year warning me about martial law coming to MN sooner than I expected. I made sure mom and dad were taken care of before I left, and I warned Dad, even though he just laughed. When I get that clear of a heads up about something in a dream, I've learned to pay attention. Now I'm hearing things through the grapevine that suggest it may actually take place for a short period of time. Could be totally wrong, but I don't want you guys to be unprepared or worried. Things will be ok either way."

While this is in part caring, and the emergency radio is truly a platinum edition model, there is an underlying concern. Two concerns really. The first is for my brother, who became a born again Christan after he began to believe he receives messages from God and who believes his dreams have real world significance and that he can heal with his hands. As far as I know, this hasn't materialized into psychosis for him and has mostly led to discomfort of and alienation from those of us who care about him, because he proselytizes his ideas. The second is about the fringe of society that has indoctrinated him, in what I assume to be his loneliness, into right-wing conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine rhetoric, and other dogma that I would previously have said exhibited complete lack of common sense. 

I say previously because these views are becoming more and more common, in significant part because they've been given oxygen by an administration that teaches against trusting experts and professional journalists and instead trusting the new gospel of demagoguery. But it worries me to now hear that the President himself is considering whether, at the advice of his loyalists, he should indeed impose martial law and attempt a military coup, because it suggests that views that would have been seen as somewhere between sedition and insanity only four years ago are now circulating widely among those with the capacity to do real harm to our nation and all of us in it, and not just to vulnerable populations like my brother.  

I don't know what to make of the new common sense. It's upside down. I spent an hour refuting my brother's fears that, like Monsanto, makers of mRNA vaccines are going to insert patented genetic material into our cells and then charge us and our offspring royalties just for living and reproducing (but only for the life of the patents, I guess?), and I didn't make much progress in that time. But it's not just about him anymore. There are evidently huge numbers of people who think like him on some of these matters. I'm as worried about our society as I am about my brother. I want to give Trump the credit he deserves as the central malignancy of this phenomenon, but the issue runs deeper, because something is making millions of individuals, most of whom mean well like my brother, susceptible to this garbage. Whether it's economic insecurity, or inadequate education, or simply the allure of belonging to a group that knows better than the so-called elite, we are vulnerable as a society, and Trump won't be the last person to take advantage of that vulnerability. 

I think what scares me the most is that, just as I haven't been able to talk my brother back from the edge, the new administration and the professional media may never be able to reach these people in time to prevent me from needing that emergency radio. In which case, which of us is the one who knows best -- me, or my brother?