Alternative Realities

I do not know if the efforts to get every­one to think and expe­ri­ence the same things are the result of any one per­son or group. It does seem awfully con­ve­nient that we are flooded by the same pieces of infor­ma­tion so con­sis­tently. I noticed this when I was in high school. We only had a cou­ple of TV chan­nels and only two or three radio sta­tions (one pri­mar­ily). The “news” sto­ries were the same. I learned later that they came “off the wire.” The tele­type machine was so noisy then that most sta­tions kept them in clos­ets. I always won­dered who was doing the typ­ing at the other end. It seemed like such magic.

Forty years later the num­ber of media chan­nels are in the hun­dreds, but it is the same set of sto­ries. The humorist in me won­ders if it is still just one per­son typ­ing it all out. Of all of the poten­tial sto­ries out there, why the hand­ful that get fed to us over, and over, and over, and over, and over (I think you get the point). Are we really that obses­sive? Is real­ity really that narrow?

Around the world, there are many mil­lions of peo­ple with alter­na­tive real­i­ties. Some live deep in jun­gles or far out in deserts. Some live right in the mid­dle of the cen­ters of broad­cast media, but are too busy in the arts to be dis­tracted by the com­mon real­ity of the day. There are monks and mys­tics com­pletely unplugged. There are entire com­mu­ni­ties, like the Amish, that were never plugged in to begin with.

I am sure that peo­ple with alter­na­tive real­i­ties are per­fectly intel­li­gent and prob­a­bly very well adjusted (maybe much bet­ter so than the most “nor­mal” among us). The con­cept of being called out of the world haunts me. Am I so inse­cure that I have spent most of a life­time try­ing to be in the cen­ter of this lesser real­ity? Have I ignored Jesus’ teach­ings about “the broad way that leads to destruc­tion?” Am I that eas­ily manip­u­lated? Isn’t “being in the world but not of the world” the same as being asked to choose an alter­nate reality?

I have a few years left on the planet. I think I will take a closer look at this. An alter­na­tive real­ity sure sounds good these days.