An alien world

Act one scene one 'the world gone bonkers'

The neuroplasticity of the brain, I am reliably informed, is constructed in such away that it filters out most of our conscious experiences as so much chaff in the wheatfields of our lives, to be ignored. How can I verify this for the reader? Try the red car experiment. You may well have never noticed one before, but if you buy one suddenly you will notice every other red car on the road! Whereas before red cars were inconsequential, now you own one, your brain recognises the colour as meaningful and brings your attention to all the others. This is how we teach our brains to recognise and recieve information. If you are prone to negativity, then that’s the reality your brain shows you.
My partner has often remarked that in life I have focused on the negatives. It is not an unwarranted observation.

When a teacher, if I entered a room expecting to find naughty children, I would find them every time. However, I controlled how I viewed the behaviour of children and always chose to see the good. This approach never let me down.
I find life much harder. I smile a lot when interacting with unknown public or servants in pursuit of their work, but I am a misanthrope at heart. On a positive, I always look to 'pay it forward' and am unable to drive past a car that has broken down without offering assistance. All my surplus garden produce goes to the local community food centre. There but for fortune.
Today my neuroplasticity was sorely tested.
I needed to break a $20 note into two tens to enter an art exhibition. I cheerfully entered a bank and smiled broadly at the teller and asked for change as I proffered my $20 note. To my astonishment I was asked if I was a customer of the bank. I enquired why, and was told if I wasn't she couldn't help me! Completely discombobulated I asked if that was an appropriate way of dealing with a member of the public who needed help. Suffice it to say when I was introduced to the manager and the policy was confirmed, I let on that I was indeed a customer, but told them rather pointedly what they might do with their $10 notes. At the next bank before I could say anything, I was asked to take off my hat!
Am I unusual in finding both these situations an affront to ordinary human interactions? Are we so limited in expressions of civility towards each other that our tribal affiliations need to be established before we may be treated in a manner our needs require?
I am a hapless prisoner in world I no longer recognise. A world where school children, non-combatant men and women, doctors, nurses and aid workers are regularly blown to pieces to satisfy a psychopathy of 'othering' huge swathes of humanity because they're 'not one of us' (to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher).
But worse than this, this behaviour is condoned by affiliated groups who reconstruct a 'victim/terrorist' narrative to suit each occasion.
Groups of hitherto law abiding citizens are arrested as 'terrorists' in their thousands for holding placards that demonstrate support for a group who are against genocide. What kind of moral, mental, gymnastics does a Home Secretary need to practice in order to pass such 'terrorist' legislation?
The artificial and enforced tribal nature of humanity has sought to normalise false realities by attempting to vilify the traits, religious affiliations, or behaviours of others that mirror exactly the same propensities found within the accusing tribe!
Who writes the script of what constitutes a rogue leader? Netanyahu has called for the destruction of a particular Arab country for over half a century claiming as he does that they represent a grave threat to peace both within the region, and the world. Meanwhile the majority of the western world applause and knowingly support his view. And yet he alone has been responsible for the destabilization by attacking a large number of countries, without UN clearance.
The average person within those countries that either support Israel, or at least buy into the narrative of Islamophobia, do so through ignorance. They have never read the history of Iran nor the Koran. They will have limited or no knowledge of how the Israeli state was created, nor the cost in human lives for its expansionism that has not let up since the day it was formed. Their only reality is formed by accepting, 'hook line and sinker', the fiction that a partisan fourth estate has fed them for 80 years!
The same goes for Trumps America. This is a country where many believe Jesus was white and spoke English. A place that was created on the utter anahilation of the nations first inhabitants erroniously referred to as Indians or indios by Columbus because he thought, on reaching the carribean, he had reached the east Indies of Asia. America is a country that has variously treated its Black population as subhuman vermin, or at best second class citizens, fit only for servitude and exclusion.

For America the rest of the world is their personal warehouse. Any natural resource needed to gratify the rapacious appetite of the American juggernaut is fair game to be harnessed and bled dry from whichever foreign country provides the source materials. A country where successive presidents have ordered the invasion, detention, and summary execution of the leaders of sovereign states and have then declared to the rest of the world "you're either with us, or against us" in such endeavours.
These two 'rogue' states alone are responsible for the destabilization of the world, and yet they point the finger at every other country as the problem.
It is utterly inconceivable to me that whilst all this carnage, corruption, and illegitimate behaviour is enacted across the globe, it is 'business as usual'. America is about to host the soccer World Cup. Israel is allowed to compete as a nation and the world largely remains silent. America is bleeding the life blood from Cuba by shutting off fuel supplies, Greenland remains in the sights of a convicted felon and psychopath determined to annex it. Putin's Russia continues to bomb and occupy parts of The Ukrain with impunity, yet will send athletes to participate in world games. Trump's war machine blows up ships in international waters and leaves sailors to drown and most recently has indicated he wants to re-occupy Bagram air base in Afgahnistan as preparation for a ground assault in Iran.
At home in Aotearoa we are governed by clowns who refuse to stand for anything. Who are embroiled in an illegitimate attempt to con a public into giving them a second term in office being ably supported by a media in the pocket of billionaires, determined to buy National, ACT, and NZF another round!
My powerlessness regarding today's transaction with two banks is small fry in the maelstrom of world events, yet it represents for me the microcosm of insulting behaviour carried out day in day out on a world stage where the audience applauds or at least grudgingly demures to acts of appalling savagery, bestiality, and corruption all carried out in plain sight.
It really is a world I no longer recognise.