What touches me in my encounters with strangers? With loved ones?

Everything and everyone has become so polarized now that the internet is in everyone’s pocket: A worldview tailored to each individual and the “facts” to support it. I don’t know why, but most everyone seems to have to have this newer, falser layer of identity on display everywhere they go and, for whatever reason, it’s everyone else’s job to affirm these false identities for them or risk interminable petty debates, or becoming alienated and “other”. None of these myriad viewpoints, the fears and concerns behind them, historically, have ever come to manifest but the emotionally charged divisions are more than obvious — it doesn’t seem to bother most. It’s as if the flesh and blood neighbors who won’t tolerate artifice are disposable in lieu of a thread of disembodied opinions that support comfortable illusions. And this is not only true of my interactions with strangers (that I attempt to keep to the bare minimum, these days). At some point I have to deal with loved ones and I’ve been limiting contact with some among them who want to make even breakfast political.

It’s not vaccines, or 5G and nanotechnology, or an occulted unelected faction of our government eating babies and appropriating our taxes to fund chemtrails of celery juice and viruses sprayed from UFO’s over the flat earth by our transgendered lizard overlords that frighten me. It’s how these absurd concepts have come to separate people from each other.