I do that from time to time: drop off the face of the Earth. Sorry about that.
Life gets a little weird sometimes, and I don't get to spend as much time as I'd like on things like this.
I've received some great comments to my first post, and noticed two of them asking the same question: "What's your solution?"
There is no quick solution, I'm afraid. There is no short answer or five key points for everyone to follow to make this all go away. I could be wrong on that, though. If you have a simple solution to that national brainwashing/dumbing-down, by all means leave it in a comment here. I'm open to all suggestions.
To tell you the truth, the best solution I could think of was to point out these patterns to others. My Great And Master Plan (such as it is) was to simply say, "Hey, look. They're treating you like a child, and you're letting them. They've convinced you to sit back and be comfortable, and let them make all the decisions for you. Now you've lost a lot of your freedoms, and some of the things and experiences that make you human as well. What are you going to do about that?"
That's it, really. Point out the patterns and let everyone do what they feel is best. Even if (
especially if) they all pull in different directions, that's a start. As long as we're not all being herded in the same direction (no matter what that direction may be), I think we'll be making progress.
I had a discussion on the phone last night with my father. He's a very smart man; very in tune with the traditional ways of doing things. When your neighbor trashes your property, you don't sue them. You walk over there, knock on the door, and work it out like men and like neighbors. When someone does you wrong, you go over there and make it right again. When you do wrong to someone else, you do everything in your power to fix what you've done, and apologize for it. That's my father. Traditional, honorable, steadfast.
My father's also a staunch Republican. He watches a lot of television, and watches way more Fox News than he should. He's a child of the Fifties and Sixties, when the television reported the news without the level of bias and bullshit you find now, and he still treats the news from Fox as if it came from the mouth of Walter Kronkite himself. He just doesn't know any better.
So, he calls me to talk about the big stink around the firing of the Attorneys by Bush, and the subpoenas which are going to be served. "What about Clinton?" he asked. "When he took office, he fired all of them, and NBC and ABC and CBS and CNN didn't say a word! What about that?"
"Why are you watching that crap in the first place?" I asked. Why waste your time watching news broadcasted by stations owned by corporations? They're just going to tell you what they want you to hear, and want you to know. "Stay away from Fox News, Dad," I said. "Stay away from CNN and all those stations."
"Well, where do you get your news?" he asks me. I tell him: I watch CSPAN now and again, listen to NPR and get my news from Jim Lehrer on PBS. I know this makes me sound like I feel that my choices are superior, but they're not. This is just all we have left in the U.S. for unbiased news.
"Oh no," my Dad says, as if I'd just mentioned the boogey man, "NPR? They're
so far to the left!!!" I really didn't know what to say. That was the single most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard my father say to me.
He had fallen for it. He had fallen for the Republican/Democrat, Right/Left, Us/Them dichotomous bullshit. I started explaining to him about the "you only have two choices, and both of them benefit us" rhetoric that I spouted below in my first post.
He thought about that for a minute, and said, "You're right. We need a Third Party."
No, no, no, no, no.
We need NO PARTIES. None. We need to (and deserve to) vote for whomever we want. There need to be more than two or three or even seventeen candidates on a ballot. That's just another way that we let them herd us in the same direction.
We are fifty States in one Union, not one Nation Under God, or One Country with fifty sets of borders. We are fifty tiny little countries who have banded together for safety, unity and (let's face it) convenience. Originally, each state made its own rules, and the Federal government only stepped in when (for example) the British or the French or the Spanish were trying to invade.
(my apologies to my reader from Spain...it was a long time ago, and I'm sure we have no hard feelings towards each other, right?) ;)
This arrangement wasn't easy to control, though, for obvious reasons. So, slowly but surely, power was leeched from the State Capitols and deposited in D.C. This is very, very wrong. The autonomy of the States is merely symbolic anymore. We're a monarchy, and the throne is in the White House.
And that's wrong.
The media, the corporate masters of "our" politicians, and others have all been working very, very slowly (but consistently) in homogenizing the United States. They do it with propoganda disguised as "news". They do it with sweeping reform and laws that no one's petitioned Congress to pass other than Corporate Lobbyists. They do it with public opinion ("Yer in Amer'ka now, furriner! Speak English!"). They do this with a lot of little things.
Just little things coming at us all the time, from all directions. These are the Patterns I've named this blog after.
Sit back and observe. Watch every ad, read every billboard, listen to every radio and television program. You'll see these patterns:
-- There's an "Us" and a "Them". You don't want to be a "Them".
-- You need to buy more than you already have. You'll be happier.
-- Work harder! You'll be able to buy more that way, which will make you happier.
-- If you don't Work Harder, "They" will get your job.
And don't even get me started on this "terrorism" bullshit.
We're being herded and ruled with the twin whips of Fear and Greed, and we make it easy for the people holding the whips by following the herd formed all around us.
My Dad's a smart man, but he's been pulled into that herd as well. I'm trying to show him the patterns--as I'm showing them to you--and making slow (but steady) progress.
Turn off your television. Get your news online--from blogs, reddit, PBS and NPR. If you're going to get your news from CNN or Fox, do yourself a favor for one week: get it from the English Al-Jazeera website at the same time. That is: for every article you read on CNN's or Fox's websites, go read an article with a similar title (or similar subject matter) on Al-Jazeera. It's easy, really. All three news sites are laid out in almost the same way.
Pick one article, and read that subject on all three sites. Then sit back and think of what you've read. Do this for a week, and you'll see the patterns. You'll see how each site takes one piece of news and spins it a certain direction.
Once you can do that, you can pick out the language, buzzwords and keywords which each site uses to "flavor" the subject with their own political or religious spin.
Do this for me, for one week. Please.
Leave a comment when you're done. Let me know I'm not the only one seeing this. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only crazy person in a country full of the sane.
Then again, sometimes I feel like Kevin McCarthy at the end of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". ;)
Sorry for the rambling on this one. It's all first-draft, stream-of-consciousness stuff this time around. Might not make any goddamned sense to anyone but me.
I hope I don't sound like Gene Ray or something. :D
