Ralph K. Ginorio 158-INS Keep Right- REAWAKEN TO REALITY

by RALPH K. GINORIO/Keep Right
| March 25, 2022 6:04 PM

Why can't today's Americans just live in objective reality? What is it about it that is so impossible to accept? Why do we play at being God instead of living well as men and women?

The U.S. Senate has recently passed a measure that eliminates the biannual time change. BRAVO! Shifting time was Ben Franklin's second biggest mistake.

However, instead of settling on standard time, these Senators are shifting everything to the false daylight saving time. Why? Do they assume that Americans are so incompetent that we cannot set schedules based in reality?

Solar time exists as a part of our objective reality. When the sun is highest in the sky, it is local noon.

International time zones were established to bring consistency to the scheduling of global trade in the industrial age. However, a few have warped this rational system to suit their own needs.

Greed prompted Kiribati (the Gilbert Islands) to wildly distort the shape of the International Date Line. Kiribati gamed this system to become the first nation to meet every new day; useful for business and banking.

The pervasive narcissism of the Chinese Communist Party mandates that all Chinese territory operate by Beijing Time. Five Russian time zones parallel this single Chinese Communist construct.

We in the USA are neither an unscrupulously self-serving Third World nation nor are we a Totalitarian Police State. Why must our leaders meddle with the structure of the natural world? Why confuse the ways we measure the diurnal movements that determine day and night?

This inability to accept reality with grace would be funny if it did not reveal a growing tendency in us towards self-delusion. Instead of a breezy willingness to take life as it comes and meet it head-on, we whinge and prevaricate.

Our naked mind's eye is now consistently covered by lenses which "correct" what we see to better suit our own theological, philosophical, ideological, and personal whims. Increasingly, we conspire with like-minded others not to recognize realities with which we do not agree.

To the extent that we each personally succumb to the temptation to beguile ourselves rather than face a reality beyond our control, we infantilize ourselves. Adults cannot be entrusted with the independent responsibilities of freedom if they react to adversity by going fetal.

2+2=4, even when it offends someone's sensibilities. Local noon is when the sun is at apogee, regardless of our feelings about it.

We owe it to ourselves to reawaken to reality! We must stop coddling delusion, within ourselves and others.

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com