Deja Vu All Over Again

I just read Marigolds’ morning post. I started writing this as a comment, when I realized that what I have here is a post in its own right.

I have to say, I wish I were suffering from OFS. I’m afraid I’ve progressed to the next stage of that disease. I actually miss the early OFS days. Back then, after banging my head on the desk, walking around the block three times and downing copious quantities of chocolate, I could still pick one topic out of the swarm of outrages, sit down and start hacking away on the keyboard. Unfortunately, I passed through the OFS stage round about the Terri Shiavo case last spring. At some point, my sense of outrage simply…short-circuited. Now when I read the news, my eyes glaze over and my head starts to wag back and forth… The only coherent thought that floats around in my brain goes something like "Oh, god…not again!" Is there an appropriate acronym for this stage of the disease? Or should we just call it Stage IV-b?

The problem is, the outrage engendered by current world/national events isn’t so much an individual emotion. It’s meant to be a component of the greater whole of social outrage, meant to be shared by the masses, meant to be rallied around and crafted into a cause for change. The words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the pages inspired by the outrage are supposed to float into the firmament, mingle with other like-inspired missives, and act as a beacon to a burgeoning cultural movement. Question the status quo. Advance the good. Expel the evil. When those passionate epistles merely rise up like little puffs of smoke only to dissipate into a vacuum of entrenched societal selfishness and national paranoia, time after time… The fire starts to go out.

The overwhelming impression that comes to me, now, when I tap into the things that are going on in this country and the world, is that we are stuck in a causality loop. For those not conversant in Trek-speak: a causality loop is a glitch in the space-time continuum where the same segment of time plays over and over again. Unfortunate souls trapped in one of these time bubbles are doomed to repeat the same actions in the same sequence forever. In the case of our intrepid Enterprise crew, their "causality loop" ends with the Enterprise blowing to smithereens. But then, it starts all over again at the beginning. Eventually, the twenty-fourth century masterminds realize they’re doing the same things over and over again, piece together the clues, and put themselves to the task of changing the sequence—avoiding that explosion that destroys the ship and throws them back into the loop—so that they can return to real time and resume their mission among the stars.

We here on twenty-first century earth are stuck in our own causality loop. We go through the same cycle of violence, shock, fear, nationalism, totalitarianism, revolution, peace, discontent…and back to violence. Some of us are catching the clues, becoming aware of the trap, raising our voices, waving our arms, trying to get people to realize what’s going on. So that we can change the pattern, avoid the inevitable outcome of violence, and the human race can advance to something different. Something greater. But day after day, the news that greets us makes us realize that it’s not working. Nobody hears us. The same things come up over and over again, escalate the conflict, advance the same old loop; as if the rut is so deeply etched in the fabric of time that there is nothing anyone can do to alter it.

Now is not our time, those few of us who are beginning to recognize the pattern and trying to change it. The sequence hasn't quite advanced far enough into the "totalitarianism" part. When it does, they’ll hear us, and then there will be revolution. The same pattern. Hard as we try, we just can’t modify the sequence enough to escape from the loop. Can’t save ourselves from what we know is coming, desperately as we may want to.

In the end, I guess this is a long, convoluted way to ask, "When will we ever learn?" And the answer is, "Nobody knows. But, apparently, not yet."

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