A spring view from a Skyline Drive overlook in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

Secret Vistas – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, Va. — You don’t have to travel to some high mountain pass to find insight in this mixed up world.

But maybe it helps. It seemed to help Moses, George Mallory and Elisha Mitchell, as I’ve written in the past.

Climbing Mountains For Inspiration: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

As I’ve often done in my life, especially over the past decade, I found myself on top of a mountain on Tuesday of this week not just admiring the amazing views. As I found a spot to meditate for a few moments over a blueberry muffin and a cup of Greek yogurt on a park bench out behind the Dickie Ridge Visitor Center off Skyline Drive, my mind wandered from the sensational crime coverage of the Stormy Daniels trial in New York to more fundamental questions.

Like “why do things seem so hard sometimes?” Or, “why can’t we seem to solve some of our more fundamental problems that make life seem so hard?”

A spring view from behind the Dickie Ridge Visitors Center along Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

I know many of you share my concerns about this, because I’ve seen you express similar sentiments on your own social media posts. We are often left wondering why it seems so hard to tackle and fix at least some of the problems that vex us?

What I came up with seems like another cliche dividing the people of the world into types. You’ve heard it before. The Google choices seem endless.

One going around these days on Reddit says:

“The world is divided into two types of people: the righteous and the unrighteous–and the righteous do the dividing.”

Well, I think there are four kinds of people in this world. Those who spend their lives being helpful and trying to fix things, those who help the people trying to fix things, those who don’t care about anything or fixing anything, and those who spend their entire lives trying to break things.

I’ve already produced a hundred stories over the past decade documenting the problems caused by those who want to break things, especially Donald Trump and his brain trust Steve Bannon. You already know that story so there’s no reason to keep repeating it.

But as I sat there looking at the view of the Appalachian Mountain peaks in the George Washington National Forest from a mountain peak in Shenandoah National Park, what occurred to me is that we have spent far too much time indulging those who like to break things and not enough time supporting those who are working their asses off to try to fix things.

I wonder: Is it somehow programmed into our DNA through evolution to like breaking things? Or could it be that fixing things has its own evolutionary rewards?

Here we are, back to the selfish gene and the trait of altruism.

Then when I woke up this morning with a plan to process the images from Tuesday and write a column to go with them and opened up Facebook, what did I see but a selfie from Mark Zuckerberg of Meta allegedly by the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France? Now I don’t know if he was actually in France. It could very well have been a fake image from his Meta AI program.

Dipshit dumbass Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg by the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. Or is it AI? MZ

But it made me remember a quote from Zuckerberg from the early days of Facebook.

“Move fast and break things,” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said once to justify why he was scaling up the traffic to his social media platform without going to the trouble to fix what was wrong with it, namely the spread of hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, racist, fascist propaganda and yes fake news that helped smear Hillary Clinton in 2016 and get enough people to vote for Trump to send him to the White House.

I guess it sounded cool at the time.

Little did anyone know the full ramifications: the breaking of the American press and democracy itself.

“The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough,” Zuckerberg said in a line that sounds just like the college freshman that he was when he dropped out of Harvard to build Facebook with computer code. He was just making it up and mouthing off, with no idea what he was talking about or where his get rich scheme project was headed.

The only text that ran with the Eiffel Tower photo was this: “IYKYK.” As in, “If you know, you know,” as if to say, “See how smart I am, and you are not.”

But just because someone figured out how to type some code and create a program that a billion people would sign up for and then proceed to waste their lives away sharing stupid memes and cat pictures — while democracy falters and the free press in America goes out of business — doesn’t make them smart. It only makes them rich, like the other rich so-called tech geniuses whose creations dominate our lives these days.

Yeah, Jeff Bezos got rich breaking book stores by selling books online, then expanded and became the online Walmart selling everything cheap, except for the Washington Post.

Elon Musk got rich breaking things, including Twitter, but his electric car named after Tesla is not so great anymore. And when he broke Twitter, he just broke it. He didn’t fix anything.

The only tech geniuses who deserve the title in my book are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who first invented the personal computer — which of course was stolen by Bill Gates who conned IBM into paying him for it — and then created the iPhone, which was immediately copied by the meth head hackers running Google.

But a break things guy like Trump never contemplated the end result. He never, ever imagined that he would actually end up having to sit through and endure an actual trial and take crap from an actual judge or that his illegalities would actually one day land him in an actual jail cell.

While we enjoy ourselves in the mountains, we hope some jailor is getting things ready for Trump down at New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, maybe the very cell where Jeffrey Epstein allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself.

Which Secret Service member will win the lottery to serve time with Trump and protect him in prison? David Pecker and Enquiring Minds want to know.

Meanwhile, as Colbert likes to say, there’s a decent guy in the White House now, working his 80-year-old ass off trying to fix things like climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation.

Do We Face the End of Decency? Or is Decency All That Endures?

Who will you support? The guys trying to break things? Or the guys and gals trying to fix things?

You know where we stand.

On this trip I also followed a group of club cyclists out of Shenandoah at Thornton’s Gap through the Shenandoah Valley, over and up into the George Washington National Forest on backroads. We passed right by the Elizabeth Furnace Recreation Area, and took a break by the tranquil Passage Creek (see photo below).

The tranquil Passage Creek running through the Elizabeth Furnace Recreation Area in the George Washington National Forest: Glynn Wilson

See you out there on the trail, deer friends, fans and followers – preferably a mountain trail.

More Photos

A spring view from behind the Dickie Ridge Visitors Center along Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

A spring view od dogwood blooms from beside the Dickie Ridge Visitors Center along Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

A spring view of the Appalachian Trail off Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

A spring view of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

A spring view from a Skyline Drive overlook in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

A spring view from a Skyline Drive overlook in Shenandoah National Park, Va.: Glynn Wilson

A Brown-headed Cowbird [Molothrus ater] on the top of the Devil’s Tree at the Little Devils Stairs Overlook on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Va., April 30, 2024: Glynn Wilson

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