This the end of the world my friends, as we know it. It used to be a nice place, or has it been? When I look at the world in hindsight, it is the accuracy and quality of the information received that makes it 20-20 or not 20-20. It also requires an attention span that is longer than ten minutes and an accurate long term memory. We, here in America, live with the need for instant gratification, thus we have everything from instant apologies, instant business, instant coffee, instant data-mining, instant electricity, instant fantasy football fulfillment, instant gearing-up for battle, instant hate-mongers, instant insurgencies of the Internet, instant jerk-knee reactions, instant killings, instant lynch mobs, instant murders and instant mayhem, instant negligence in words and deeds, instant opinions on everything and everybody, instant political pedophiles that proliferate profuse public processions, instant quick-picks, instant radical racist rage and instant reality shows, instant standard deviants with no discipline, instant treasury and trust failures, instant universal usurped uprisings, instant vigorous and voluminous violence with no value, instant weather from the willfully witless, instant xenophobic inferiority complexes, instant young y-chromosomal yellow-fevered yellers and chanters, and instant zealots.

People get for-warned, with valuable information, and then don't use it to help themselves or the ones nearest and dearest to them. They put on the blinders that produce tunnel vision so as to not see the side issues that are coming at them. Peaceful people are typically politically polite. They practice pragmatism, procedural processes, and present their problems in public in profound ways with means towards a functional finite fellowship. Then there are the others who are blinded as well, to their own failings, and the failings of the ones that they follow. They turn their fears into anger against those that they perceive as the problem, and point their fingers and their guns, and their false rage towards the Innocent individuals that have tried to use their intellect to help, and not hinder their progress.

The dark ages are centuries long, and many have and will suffer. The church used it power, in the past, and now in the present, to keep the people in-check, ignorant, and poor. The church elders took/take their tithes, their enforced ten percent, and put it in their pockets for political profit, and propound their power. They used their collective education and intellect to keep that control and they make sure that the uneducated stay that way. Where ever they went in the new world, they would burn, rape and destroy the collected wisdom of those they found. They would subjugate their new flocks with 'new ignorance' and made them believers and reciters of information that only the church fathers control and disseminate with disturbing dissonance. The church fathers would flail their flock should they disobey, disagree, or show disdain. Indoctrination was the ideal form of control, and often used the threat of death to deter detractors. They made believers, and didn't want thinkers. They would put the thinkers in prison until the thinker gave up on their contrary thoughts, rules of logic, and any remembrance of relevant facts from their former lives. The thinkers could only know what the church fathers wanted them to know. Real Truths were irrelevant. Change the “facts” and you change the truth. Believers were made to believe the “facts” until the “facts” became their truth. If they didn't believe there was always death, as the final truth.

Since the beginnings of human existence there has always been dark ages, however, interspersed between those ages are times of enlightenment, learning, experiment, and empowerment for the populous as a whole. There was a sharing of information, of art, of culture, of science, and the knowledge gained from the endeavors of individuals. Humor from the co-experienced foibles of family and friends, became the foundation of wisdom. The ability to laugh at oneself, and collectively at one's civilization, and getting past serious dealings with others lead to a better understanding and further the features of that foundation of wisdom. The preservation of the present-past, for the fervent future of those yet to come, to reduce their failings and produce a progressive populous that would become even more profound the world around and produce and proliferate progress in the care of the people in the present-past and into the present-future.

Let us not descend into darkness, in our present, and wallow in a past that serves only the ignorant. The intolerant need not be tolerated. Be at peace until it is no longer an option. Keep open your oculars and use them to make a difference, to know the difference, to become that difference between Real Ignorance and Real Truth. Be not so proud of the past, for pride goeth before the fall. Keep your oculars on the present, also know your past, however stay focused on the future, where our 20-20 is not so well endowed, and stay virulently vigilant against the dark ages for they can come on instantly, often without warning, and always with violence. Suffer not the loud and proud voices of the ignorant, for they are full of prejudice against those of progressive enlightenment, and they would condemn everyone who thinks for themselves. Stay true to yourselves, keep faith in real knowledge and the wisdom that comes with that knowledge, and be not blinded in your oculars, go forth in earnest energy, save family and friends, and the future foundations of humility, honor, and the healthy humor of humanity. We all are fanciable and fallible, for we are just human beings.