Breaking Out

It is common knowledge that lighting, cameras, acting, special effects are like shadows on a screen. Show business works hard to maintain the illusion for the value of their ticket sales. They don’t want you looking behind the set, costumes and make-up.

But there is that factor of the audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” voluntarily agreeing to accept the given façade and script for the sake of a good time. In the public arena this is compounded by our cultural rule of loyalty, whether the message or policy is right or wrong; rally the masses to endorse and confirm the party line and anyone who doesn’t fall in line is the traitor to be axed. Persona, branding, and presentational style are keys for attracting loyalty. The legitimate performing and media arts have been bastardized to dominate and manipulate public perception and behavior.

But we can decide to look away from the screen and remember what reality is. More people used to be able to walk out of the theater and go back to their real lives. It is getting harder to do that with the pervasive control over media, staging fantasies in real neighborhoods, and pouring billions of dollars into monuments, ballrooms, private militia, wars and cover-ups. Even so, we can pop the bubble which the Trump/MAGA cult has encased us within?

We can break out of the fantasy world they have projected around us. We can still look away and view our real conditions. The knowledge of good and evil is not a new idea which can be revised by re-writing history. What humanity has learned the hard way about good and evil, right and wrong, we can still remember. We can remind each other what is good and true, that our better nature is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Source of Life (Micah 6:8).

Are you getting tired of the artificial? 
The performances so realistic they are deadly?
Did you believe the riff on a biblical theme
Which cast the big movie show in the sky
With all your wishes for escape to heaven,
 
Heaven so far away and safe 
From all the goons climbing out of hell
To eat your pets, rape your women
And change your children's genders?
 
Is your gold growing mundane
On all your statues and gilding, 
Toilets and faucets?
 
Are you no longer impressed 
By the shootings at home 
On the screen, in the school,
At the church, on the mall
In the streets, around the globe?
 
The staging of mayhem
Framing your man as the victim
And assassins apprehended 
To punish for profit
In alligator camps?
 
Tired of expectations
From claims of omnipotence
Only to watch incompetence?
 
Realizing show business co-opted
As their bubble machine
Capsulating spectators
Willingly suspending disbelief,  
Owns your eyes, feeds your soul
With shadows conning you 
To sleep in unreality?
 
When will you break from the preachers
Serving illusions invented from 
Fanciful takes on scripture
Supporting wishes born of self-worship,
Racism, misogyny,  
Privilege, ignorance, gluttony?
 
There is a freedom outside your bubble,
The rest of reality beyond the blindness;
You could be delivered from the womb,
Born yet again, and again,
Each a revelation 
Of who we'd rather become.

                                                                              Mark R. Turner
                                                                     May 29-June 3, 2026
                                                                                Athens House