I have chosen words or situations for this week’s prompt from Baba Vanga’s predictions for 2023.
- Devastating solar storm
- Explosion in a nuclear plant
- Human birth in laboratories
- Alien attacks
- Earth changing its orbit
- Bioweapons
You need not use the words verbatim. You can use one or more of the situations as a stimulus for imagination and base your piece on it.
Fear and the UNKNOWN: The Promotion of Fear and Ignorance through Censorship
Jesse folded his hands and sat back from the computer screen.
The staff prediction’s list in front of him, of mostly apocalyptic events, made him chuckle. Most had already happened to some degree and the others were based on what his more alarmist fellow science fiction editors liked to call unverified ‘conspiracy theories’.
He’d come to accept that blatant lack of self-awareness from co-workers, that was currently spreading faster than Covid-19, but rather than get upset by it, he chose to be amused.
Theories, after all, encompassed the whole genre with which they were dealing. Only recently had the modifier of “conspiracy” become a popular ‘wink’ for dismissing big ideas. The only conspiracy he could detect was this new, unimaginative, ‘group denying’ of thought according to ‘tastes’. But the covert- and alarming- call for censorship was not something registering on his ‘amusement meter’. He wanted people who worked for him to have a great deal of intellectual confidence in their ability to entertain all ideas.
Current recommendations to remove ‘misinformation’ from the public square by ‘experts’ (and political tyrants) who believe the public is subject to mass hysteria, made Jesse shudder. He’d even heard a few folks complain that other people’s ideas were harmful! Jesse understood how more information and ideas, not less or fewer, offer us the better chance to remain calm and reasonable when tested.
The dire prediction on the list of an Alien Attack in 2023 had tickled him the most, though. Jesse wondered how many of his young staffers were aware of the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. If so, he wondered if they’d confirmed their elitist inclinations a bit from the media propaganda of that time. He decided to call a meeting in order to give them more information.
As for the rest of the list of 2023 predictions, Jesse thought, “Who knows?”.
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