Icing on the cake

Over the holidays, some of us could hardly get to desserts. To further indulge, few might finger-lick the icing on the cake. Our hockey-stick-shaped technology-driven society is like that cake, barely exploited. Only with the right skills e.g. work well with robots – and market/timing combination that its full potential be realized.

Or else, its first rinse is just waste water e.g. behavior modification on social media: human weakness gets amplified, dirt laundry aired and retweeted.

It takes a while to undo a habit, yet it only takes a bit over two months to form one, bad or good. We check twitter, facebook, instagram to see ourselves in them: no beef? salivate anyway (confirmation bias). All of a sudden, incoming Senator Romney smells like flowers after two wash cycles of Trump: the conservative agenda without the icing on the cake. David Brook referred to character as “eulogy virtue”. As if this current President cared more about presidency than pomposity.

We are entering the second half, drained ( not the swamp, it is still there, while the wall has yet to be built. In Frost’s line, we still have “miles to go”). It’s a post-Cold War World, post-truth world, and Washington Post world. We need courageous journalists, more fact-checking, more bravery whose mode of operation is to let the chips fall where they may.

Or else, like those holiday meals we stuffed ourselves with, truth lies beneath the icing. The irony of life is we cannot see the whole truth where we stand. Only from an objective distance in space and time that we might, only might, come to appreciate truth for what it is. Certainly not the icing on the cake. And like cake, you cannot have it and eat it all at the same time.