When what is isn’t & vice versa

We hear a lot about the herd these days – instincts, immunity and wisdom. But today’s silent herd minority are tomorrow’s vindicated heroes.

“Intermittent” is the best way I could describe comms here in Aquitaine-sous-mer at the moment. Now you see them, now you don’t.

The reason is very simple: we are suffering violent storms involving incontinent Gods seemingly attached to some kind of Universal Grid of Frankensteinian electronic power. I am awed by such natural things; the trouble with human crypto-Gods is that they think they can resist them – be the profession social anthropology, human wiring, pack primates, hitech, medicine, climatology or commerce.

The evidence they can’t is thick on the ground.

During  thunderstorms of any ferocity, the first thing to go is satellite TV reception, alongside its irksome cousin, Satellite internet. The next casualty in rural France is often the electricity supply….but in the event of that somehow surviving, mid 20th century telegraph wires being bashed by tree branches and mounted on less than wind-resistant wooden poles usually knock out one’s phone line – and along with that, the neat little internet router box that maintains such an air of impregnability. Until it winks a lot, but delivers nothing.

Spill just two droplets of coca cola, beer, wine or fruit juice on the keyboard of a laptop, and you can kiss goodbye to €450 worth of kit.

Yes, the pinched goblins can censor, deplatform and fake a human version of reality, but they are at a loss in the face of anything and everything natural and humanely fallible.

Sadly, they have an ally in the shape of Herding Mentality. This is my focus in the post you are (I hope) about  to continue reading. Because those who bribe the legislators, own the media and have a near-monopoly on power can control the direction of any and every issue in any sovereign State where those with totalitarian aspirations are in charge.

In that context, the herd instinct is to demand conformity…and before too long, to start marginalising and then bullying those who refuse to accept what is, when it isn’t. And vice-versa.

Across the globe, millions of taut teenagers, grumpy grandads, commonsense cousins, dedicated Dads, secretive sisters and not entirely moronic mothers are being begged by the other less sensitive souls inhabiting the family home to shut the fuck up and stop spoiling the enjoyment of multivariate denial.

I am bombarded every day with heart-wrenching accounts of those High Nooners* surrounded by everyone else in town who ask only that the Sheriff run away and stop causing trouble for the law-abiding folks of Dry Gulch.

The accused are the heroes. The accusers are the cowards. Twas ever thus.

I ask only this of the heroes: be assured that it is not you: there is no shame in minority

* High Noon – an early 1950s Western movie in which Gary Cooper refuses to run away from the murderous Frank Miller