The World According to Pederson: I Can't Handle the Truth, and Neither Can You

The world is ending and everybody is going to die. That's what you'd think is happening by everything going on in the news. Our love of drama and tragedy has turned society into a speeding bus, much like the one from Speed with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. We must accelerate into chaos because a world where everybody actually likes each other isn't good for news headlines, social media feeds, and this overall need for relevance created by Tik Toks, Kardashians, and blonde haired idiots, who wear Charizard cards around their necks. The world, or perhaps the United States, has become quite the spectacle. It's become a real circus propelled forward by corrupt and senile politicians, race issues, and gamers in hot tubs.

Perhaps life as we know it isn't ending, and it's just wishful thinking. Maybe we don't know how to fix things, so we just let the avalanche continue to consume, hoping that one day we'll be able to pull our heads out of our backsides and deal with the endless deluge of hurt feelings, economic troubles, and waves of fear that dictate our actions. Maybe the speeding bus that is "society" needs to decelerate, and whether that happens by choice or some greater event that causes us to hit the reset button isn't exactly clear at the moment. Maybe we need a Dennis Hopper to lead us into the inevitable explosion that will hopefully make us better on the other side. Whatever happens, and however it happens, everybody needs to just chill.

I think I know where to start.

I've been having a lot of conversations with my kids lately about lying. I love my kids, but I literally can't trust anything they say. They lie about brushing their teeth. They lie about cleaning their room. They lie about who is lying. The house could be up in flames, and they could be holding real matches with real fire on the end, and they would still tell me they didn't do it. Not to make light of pre-school arson, but you get what I mean. They're not trustworthy. I always tell them how much I don't like lying, but then I find myself always lying to them. For example, they're always asking if things in Disney movies are real, to which I answer "they could be." Fun fact: they're not. However, trying to tell a six and seven year old that carpets don't actually fly, and you can't actually ride one off a balcony is almost like telling them that Santa Claus isn't real. It could have life shattering repercussions. On a side note, I showed them Home Alone a couple of years back and while my wife and I were out buying Christmas presents, I got a phone call saying they tried to ride a sled down some stairs. They're very impressionable by the things they both hear and see, and you can never know how they're going to react. This is why I blame Disney whenever we send our seven year old to her room and she breaks off into song about what horrible parents she has. Point being, I ask them not to lie, yet, I lie to them. Perhaps I'm part of the problem?

Then I look at the things I see in the news, social media, or even just in public, and I realize that we're all a bunch of six and seven year olds. We want our beliefs to be validated so bad that we're willing to either create or consume whatever lies we must to create a reality in which we're right. This is why nobody speaks the truth . . . there's no need for it. I can stand in a park and tell everybody the sky is blue, but if they want to believe it's green, they'll make me look like I'm crazy, until doctors show up with a straight jacket and lock me in a padded room. And it doesn't matter what political belief you hold, or what gender, race, or sexuality you identify as, we all do this. We create our own gods and our gods create us.

If you take a broad view of American culture, you'll find that a lot of our problems exist because nobody is honest with each other. In fact, nobody is honest, in general. People don't speak the truth because, in the words of the great Jack Nicholson, "You can't handle the truth." Nobody can handle the truth. Not my kids, not society, not even me. We've become the authors of a false reality, and if there's something in this reality that we don't like, we just erase it and replace it with something else. Because of this, we will all continue to lie to each other out of fear of being cancelled until the world consumes itself and we all identify as genderless patio furniture.