Taste testing, redux …
~ without clarity, we're often left with a bitter taste, or a better one
Musings … my thoughts, every day since March 20, 2003 … now in my 24th year, haven’t missed a day; love the ‘likes’ - thanks to those who click the heart button, I’d love to see more comments and extensions of the conversation - so, please click the cloud-shaped balloon with your comments and/or suggestions - they make this writer better and are shared with all readers who get this publication.
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Yesterday, I wrote about life as a taste-testing metaphor - because I love to cook up things in the kitchen, or around a kitchen table … so, let’s talk.
Today, I am less interested in appetite than in what keeps being served up to us as normal. The flavour of the moment isn’t what we’re cooking up for dinner.
It’s what’s been cooked up and fed to us every day - it’s a 24/7 message-mix-fest of confusion, distraction, and too many bullies competing for time at the same pulpit …
It’s public life, private views, local and national government, public opinion - all mixed in real time, and too often swallowed without enough resistance.
As a follow-on to yesterday’s recipe rumination, I keep thinking about how many things now arrive not as settled truths, but as flavours of the hour. Not dinner, exactly. More like public appetite. Moral seasoning. Civilizational aftertaste. We call it news, analysis, commentary, leadership, and culture. But so much of it feels like live taste testing, one outrage, one rumour, one threat, one reversal at a time. Open the paper. Open the email. Answer the phone. There it is again: another revision to what matters. Are we overwhelmed by confusion, or by the possibility that things are becoming horribly clear, and that too few people mean to do much about it?
My Musing column yesterday argued that life rarely behaves like a recipe card, and that we improvise, adjust, and taste again because the eater changes.
Today’s intentionally darker sequel, I think, is that power does this too.
Politics does it. Whole societies do it. They mix panic with theatre, fear with vanity, noise with strategy, then ask us to swallow the result as normal. Maybe that’s why so many of us squint at screens, delay opening messages, or ration our intake of headlines. Maybe we are not ducking uncertainty at all. Maybe we are dodging recognition. Maybe the taste in our mouth is not confusion, but clarity. And worse, the suspicion that collapse does not always come from ignorance. Sometimes it comes from people who know exactly what they’re doing, and from the rest of us deciding not to interrupt the meal.
I’m not naming people, parties of countries - because Canada and our loud, large neighbour to the south don’t own this malaise; it’s global. That’d be reflected and pointed back at us every day if we tune in; and, if we tune it all out, it’s going on every day just the same.
A society can lose its bearings the same way a bad cook ruins a meal: by getting used to the taste of what should never have been acceptable.