Lessons Still to Learn | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, September 18, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

September 17, 2021

Who is it who says the closer you are
to an irreversible apocalypse the more fragile
language is?
We slid the dictionaries from the shelves
and opened them to apocalypse,
the word on everyone’s lips.
~Catherine Barnett, Amor Fati

If I were writing a story about the post-apocalyptic world of some grungy little planet in a far corner of the universe, it might have a scene like this:

We huddle in the bread aisle at the supermarket, heads together, whispering. I show her the religious exemption badge which declares that no one can force me to wear a mask or get a medical test or an injection.



She touches the badge reverently. “Can I take a picture of this for my daughter? They’re trying to force her to get the vaccine…she wants another baby and she’s read about the reproductive damage those injections cause…”

Even in post-apocalyptic fiction, such a scene would strain credulity. Never mind that it is simple truth on Planet Earth at this moment of our evolution.

*****

I don’t much care for post-apocalyptical fiction. The Hunger Games holds no appeal for me. The “real” world holds little appeal for me at the moment, either.

But hope has not perished. I’m still sure it’s all going to come right in the end, despite appearances to the contrary.

I can be a bit of a hopeless Charlie Brown dupe. Every time Lucy balances that football for him to kick, he’s persuaded to do so.

She yanks it away at the last moment and he ends up kicking air and falling to the ground in a cloud of dust.



The latest release of the Man of God documents has left me feeling like Charlie Brown after the prize has been yanked away.

Perhaps it’s petty to be nitpicky about apparent typos that change a work’s meaning. However, my faith in whoever Man of God is, as well as those who released the documents, has diminished. (1)

Language matters to me, and I view with distrust the careless deployment of the written word.

*****

I feel my next task is to dust off the disappointment and disillusion I allowed to overwhelm me when reading those documents. Remind myself to exercise discernment. Read them one more time, and watch the explanatory video, if one is released, as happened with Document 1.

Meantime, I think I’ll go compare bruises with Charlie Brown.



(1) Two insiders who released these documents reportedly on behalf of “Man of God,” Simon Parkes and Charlie Ward, seem unfazed by (what I view as) the documents’ awkwardly written and sloppily proofread content.