"Oblivious to the obvious" describes the willful madness, the chosen madness, the cultivated madness now entrenched and fortified in our society. There is no easy breaking of this spell, this spell cast by the rich and powerful seeking more riches and power, this spell cast via media manipulation.
The great tides of societal change arise when someone learns to harness the fear, anger, and latent madness that restlessly lurk in the darker recesses of the human soul. Such is the phenomenon now unfolding in our nation and the world. The worst of human nature has once again been harnessed and brought to focus, the frightened and angry masses set into concerted stampeding motion, fear and fulmination concentrated into irrational political panic. It catches us by surprise, these surging tides of self-destructive populism. "It could not happen here!" is our cry of denial as at the behest of miscreant leaders the mobs set alight the foundations that support and sustain their own interests. Values and truth, logic and reason, may lose the day, as they often have throughout history.
We must try to preserve our society, nation, and democratic institutions. But failing that, we must preserve our values, principles, and truth, preserve them at the individual level, at the family level, at the level of our souls. These are the seeds from which freedom and liberty of the human spirit, progress and hope of the human species, have always sprung, in times of opportunity and times of hopeless despair.