Let无毛视频檚 cool it and unite
Before the recent horrendous assassination attempt in Butler County, in what I considered to be a very civil response to a post on social media, an acquaintance of the person who made the post responded this way, “If you don’t do what we want, we will come at you with our guns.” To which my friend wrote, “Wow, you took it there?”
That reminded me of the early days of our marriage when my wife was experimenting with soup-making in a pressure cooker. That thing would rock, shoot out steam, and rumble incessantly. We always felt like we were a few minutes or seconds away from either being killed or picking carrots, potatoes, and remnants of green beans off the walls and ceiling.
I started to feel some comfort when both Joe Biden and Donald Trump mentioned something that was not typically a part of their campaign addresses. Both men called for unity. Wow, we hadn’t heard anything like that in a very long time. How crazy would that even be? Is something like that possible after the past several years?
Then I saw a list of incredibly incendiary comments made over the last 10 years on both sides that was like watching the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lit with Roman candles in slow motion.
All of this took me back to the analysis I read a few years ago about the difference between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. When it came to competing for resources, Homo sapiens ended up winning the extinction battle because they developed an ability that Neanderthals lacked. Even though Neanderthals had some level of communication and social skills, we Homo sapiens were much more adept at things like complex languages.
More clearly, Homo sapiens were incredible at lying as a form of social manipulation. By lying and deceiving the Neanderthals, they were able to facilitate better strategies for hunting. It’s theorized that they misled Neanderthals about the location of the animals and potential threats posed by going to those locations.
In other words, the capacity for lying and their ability to communicate in more complex manners made Homo sapiens more adept at facing challenges. Ultimately, this use of strategic deception played a major role in Homo sapiens’ ability to compete in ways that resulted in the extinction of the Neanderthals. We lied our way to the top.
This takes us to today’s American society where deception has become an art form, but there are no more pure-blooded Neanderthals to wipe out. So now we have turned on each other.
I’d like to blame it all on the talking heads of the liberal and conservative media, Hollywood, and any number of other for-profit communication platforms, and maybe that’s where we should start. However, it was the internet and social media that have been the spark that ignited this phenomenon. People who previously lived in silence and solitude with their unusual, previously condemned, or wildly crazy beliefs are now able to find each other and spread those beliefs no matter how bizarre and conspiratorial.
To quote a friend who quoted an author, Jonah Goldberg, “Man is by nature a social animal who defines his place in life, his purpose, and his happiness by the associations he makes.” Our social connections are very critical to us. “But our institutions have been failing us, and we no longer trust them while suspecting others.”
He again quoted Goldberg, “A person’s political party affiliation became their line in the sand to all the shifting ground under their feet. Party loyalty became sacrosanct, and nothing should tarnish the ideology it represented.”
So, with that challenge in mind, can we possibly cool things down and analyze where we currently are in our tribal warfare? Manipulation is the tool to gain power and money. Remember P.T. Barnum who said, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Are we the suckers?
Let us try to cool down and unite.
Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.