We’re Not Better Off Having More Choices We Don’t Want and Can’t Use

“Do you want to give all your money to me, or do you want me to take it from you?”

I can hear our elected officials explaining how they are giving taxpayers more choice -- and not less (no) choice.

“Do you want to be stuck in traffic, or do we want to ride a boat that takes twice as long to get there?” And if we choose to take the boat, is it all right if we have to take the bus all the way because the boat is not running today?

So many choices -- so little time. But what does it all mean? Nothing that makes any sense at all -- but did we expect any?

Fortunately, blogdom is alive and well to report and record all this -- even as the local newspapers suppress and censor to their heart’s content, to maintain their illusion of Paradise -- which is themselves as the smartest people in the islands and the only people allowed to seem to make sense. Everybody else’s comments and submissions will be hopelessly garbled and edited to achieve nonsense -- to say what the editors (and powers that wish to remain so) want everybody else to say.

The choice then is, do we want them to publish what they want us to say -- or would we rather they not publish what we have to say? That is freedom of expression (choice) -- according to the local newspapers, and they can’t understand why we all can’t compromise to their point of view -- as we are all entitled to their opinion.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of subscribers left to cancel their subscriptions over a prolonged period of erosion so that at the end, they won’t know when it was they became irrelevant-- not that they would have cared anyway. They will go on writing for as long as they can, regardless of whether anybody takes them seriously anymore or not -- “because that is their job," regardless of whether it needs to be done or serves any beneficial purpose anymore.

We’re offered limited and even bogus choices -- as though choice was for the pure exercise of some long forgotten glorious moment in the past when such things actually mattered -- but now, we simply must adhere to what their political correctness and conventional wisdom tell us through these self-designated authorities, what we must do. And they will convince us, it is the same everywhere else and in all times -- and probably worse, daring us to risk the unthinkable -- which is the banishment from paradise, with all its “irresolvable” problems.

Real choices are not a cultural and societal option. There is the socially and politically approved way -- or one can take a trip to the ends of the earth, whereupon one falls of the edge and is never heard from again.

But then a few filter back with reports that there is indeed life on the other side of the rainbow -- and it isn’t half bad and may be even better, even if it’s not “paradise” -- like all the insurmountable difficulties here are.

There is a world of viable and attractive choices beyond the “one and only,” demagogues will try to convince us of -- from time immemorial.