SNAFU was originally a World War II-era military acronym standing for “Situation normal: all f**ked up.” These days, a snafu is any mistake or problem.
Because I am a writer and a businessperson, I tend to live in a constant state of conflict. I vacillate between idealism and pragmatism, and lately, I have been finding it harder to live with bouncing between those two modalities.
There are some who would tell me that these are concepts in opposition to each other. But I don’t buy that. I think they are two sides of the same coin and every day the coin gets flipped and the up-facing side is determined by just how crazy the world is at the moment.
I was able to live this way quite comfortably until I started to sense that the world around me had started to change. A lot of things stopped making sense.
I trace this back to September 11, 2001, when all the lives of many of the people in North America changed and not for the better.
We had a new fear. A new Bogey Man. A new enemy. A whole religion. A whole quarter of the world, at that time, became the enemy. It impacted us all. It filled us with a fear we never had before. It forced many of us to turn inward and shun the world. It turned others of us outward to attack the world through whatever means we had at our disposal.
We have all been living with this fear for so long that we have become used to it. And all this time, the powers that be in the world, have been working very hard to condition us to support the outward attack. And those who they cannot brainwash with propaganda, they distract with time and mindsuck things like blockbuster movies, more and more TV and social media, much of which is mindless drivel.
The world’s economy, for the most part, is dependent on one key element. War. It’s been this way all through the recorded history of the world. And the powers that be have gone to great lengths to ensure that we are either conditioned to or suitably distracted from opposing these wars.
The businesses that profit from this ongoing state of war are quiet. They lurk in the shadows making a fortune sucking raw materials from the earth and turning them into weapons with which we destroy each other. Then other businesses make fortunes rebuilding what has been destroyed.
In the advertising business where I was raised, this is known as one of the biggest of the big ideas.
These businesses don’t even have to lobby all that hard to get the things they want. Governments everywhere simply consider being in bed with these people part of the cost of the business of taking or staying in power.
And the vast majority of people simply fiddle. Because what else can they do? Bob Dylan had it right way back in the 1960s when he wrote;
Come senators congressmen
Please head the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
It’s a pretty big machine that we are all up against. The saddest part of all of this is that none of it is done in the cause of freedom or democracy or Christianity or Islam or humanity. It’s all being done in the name of power and greed. It’s all being done so that the many can die to preserve the few.
But the idealist in me knows that this is not right and that sooner or later the world needs to change into a place where this relentless obsession for power and this sick greed needs to stop.
A world that is based on war is one that is doomed to self-destruction.
The technology we have at our disposal today has the ability to power the world and feed every soul without depleting the earth’s raw materials.
What is missing is popular will. The will of the people to want to see these changes take root and grow.
But this is not going to happen until the majority of people everywhere wake up and realize that their leaders are mainly carpetbaggers, that all the stuff they take for granted is slowly disappearing. And that false constructs like TV and movies and social media are nothing more than fluffy distractions, shiny objects to keep their attention focused on anything but reality.
A lot of people will find this kind of negative. But if you take a few minutes to look around at what’s really happening in the world while you were looking at little goats bouncing on a trampoline, you might see it for what it really is, which is an attempted wake up call.
