Good Morning Digital Neighbors!!! Happy Halloween and Monday! How about little nostalgia this morning? Think back of the days long past when we just had one day a year to celebrate pretending to be someone or something else? One put on a costume, played the role, and then returned to your ordinary life with its acceptable level of engagement and monotony. Some lead more dramatic lives, many others lead rather mundane lives that might pass without too much fanfare or notice when the wake their passing leaves behind is gone and forgotten. Our lives are charged with meaning even when others know nothing of it, in fact fame is just another drug that the mind can crave once it has a taste of it. Nothing wrong with fame, but as far as contributing to the human endeavor, less of a contributor, more of a leech and most often a vanity trip with spectators.

One day a year, and the occasional masquerade, were the times we could pretend to be someone or something else. It seemed like a good outlet for creativity and indulging the more playful side of our minds. The commercialization of Christmas has now been surpassed by the Halloweenification of daily life. We indulge those playing pretend with their genders, not treating actual dysphoria as a mental illness but as an expression of self. We have allowed the delusional to determine the normative and the emotionally fragile and mentally ill to chastise the healthy for lack of compassion, failure to understand and above all an unwillingness to adapt to the current identity. Others must make all kinds of changes in concession to the new identity.

Thank God for courageous parents who will be the ones to stop this indulgence with collective madness. Thank God for those bold enough to say NO. Weather the rage, suffer the countless attempts to coerce, and do not concede thinking that one concession out of compassion will ever be sufficient for the ravenous deranged. The abuse of compassion over the last 60 years will lead to, if it has not already, to a backlash of indifference and callous disregard. It is never too late, but we are better off saying no before the fracturing than having to pick up the pieces. We have already allowed the inmates from the asylum to determine too much in the last 20 years.

Let's get back to playing pretend, to allowing roles to expand our imagination, to put on a role and then return to the ordinary without having others indulge or acknowledge the new you. Imagination is meant to be fun, to play at the edges of our knowledge, to brush up against the fantastic and fearful and then return us to our normal walk of life. Life is wonderful, may we continue to make it so for our children and ourselves. Shelter them from the madness of modern live and the corrosive impersonal climate often found in education and promoted in "higher" education. So much of our love of neighbor is to talk them through these chapters of madness. Happy Monday & Halloween my friends! Fight the good fight with clarity and humor, courage and charity, and informed engagement.

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity. - Thomas Sowell