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Flashbacks

I occasionally have drug flashbacks. I have never used illegal substances but I knew folk as an undergraduate who did, and sometimes I have memories of them come back unbidden. In particular I do remember a friend (we were both movie fanatics and frequently saw each other at showings on campus) who tried LSD and was not quite the same afterward.

I had friends who encouraged me to try things. 99% of the time it was alcohol, and since I had an alcoholic uncle who used to beat my cousins I wasn't enthusiastic about going that route. Occasionally it was marijuana but since I used to be an asthmatic as a child I had no interest at all in inhaling any kind of smoke into my lungs.

On rare occasions I would be encouraged to try psychedelics. I was small and uncoordinated growing up and I never prized my appearance or athletic ability but my mind seemed to work well enough to let me achieve things that made me proud. I never wanted to mess with that.

The folk that encouraged me all claimed that nothing bad would happen to me if I tried any of the above. I had reasons for reflexively saying no but I also had time to contemplate their apparently sincere belief in something that they had absolutely no data to guarantee. 

We live in a world of misinformation, where folk are encouraged with nothing more than fear-mongering and repetition that COVID is a hoax, that climate change is a hoax, that Trump is the messiah who won in 2020.  Every now and then someone talks about it all being unprecedented, but I know deep in my heart that it is a question of degree, not substance. The vast majority of the world is quite happy to have firm beliefs that could easily be tested and confirmed or refuted and choose not to do so. This is the world that I have lived my life in and I have never known a time when it was untrue.

So I live professionally in academia. We, the faculty, are collectively mistaken about many things but our shared value is to test our beliefs regularly as part of a community and it has always felt like a refuge to me. It is how I think life is best lived, and the burden is on us to provide an encouraging and compassionate witness to the rest of the world.  

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