Pagan Freethinker perspective on politics, religion, nature, saving the planet Earth, and civil disobedience with a keyboard, t-shirts, and lots of attitude.
What if Sarah Palin were Muslim? Would we ignore her map with a rifle scope situated over Arizona? Would we dismiss her calls to overthrow our government to replace it with one she prefers? Would we brush aside her hateful and divisive comments as free speech?
What if Glenn Beck were black? Would we consider him a terrorist, a White Panther bent on destroying America from within? Would we denounce him, parade his image on television and refer to him as an enemy of America?
What if Rush Limbaugh were Hispanic? Would we accuse him of sedition, of Treason against the United States for refusing to accept the elected President of the United States as our country's leader?
What if Fox News was an Arab station? Would we demand it be taken off the air for perpetuating hatred and division? Would we label it a terrorist organization?
What if one day we woke up and realized the terrorists were not Arab, not Muslim, not Black, not Hispanic? What if we woke up and realized they were white racists bent on destroying America from within? What if we realized the terrorists were the very people we gave a pass to simply because they were white? What would that say about our intelligence as a species? What would it say about us as human beings? What would it say about our ability to be used, abused and manipulated by those who realized long ago the biggest rope we hang ourselves with is our own hatred?
Stupid was once found only in what used to be called "pockets of ignorance." It was a a dark area that was seen as an aberration, a wart on the rising star that was America. Decent people occasionally went to these pockets and did charity work such as teaching the uneducated how to read, how to learn basic skills that would hopefully move them from ignorance to the next level which was preparing them to learn, to become educated, to become a contributing member of society. No one really thought of it as a permanent condition or as an affliction that couldn't be healed. People for the most part, believed it was something that a free and equal education could universally heal. It was also seen as character building for those who went and tried to help the less fortunate.
And for a long time it worked well. America was the land of promise where the promise was if you worked hard, educated yourself, and were a decent human being, than you would be rewarded for it. The reward was always tied in to self-determination, that the value of your worth would increase with how hard you were willing to work, how focused you were willing to remain to acheive your goals, how well you used your intelligence.
It was also a time when intelligence was actually valued, when an education was something important, when civil discourse meant those with opposing points of view could sit down at the same table and learn something from each other.
But somewhere along the way, the greedy power pigs realized that people who were free to think for themselves were also free to question the free ride the wealthy were hitching on the backs of the working class. The concept of a free education was too much of a threat to their entrenched way of life so universities grew more expensive. Only the wealthy could afford the "good" schools and eventually even they moved from a classic education that encouraged free thought and discourse, to one where business models began to substitute for philosophical models.
This allowed the children of the wealthy to obtain a prestigious piece of paper without having to study very hard to obtain it. It allowed over-indulged idiot children like George Bush to make the necessary business connections without ever having to read a book, because the rich and powerful needed their useful tools to continue stealing and manipulating the wealth of the country for their own purposes, and the Dubyas of the world were plentiful among the children of the rich.
But in order to carry out their business as usual, they had to make sure only the idiots were educated. In order to do that, education had to first become too expensive for the average person. It was the first method of legal segregation that still exists today, and with the cutting of funds for grants and scholarships, the divide between the educated and the uneducated grew larger.
However, there were still those who managed to infiltrate their schools and obtain one of those pieces of paper through hard work and determination. But because they were there for an education and were denied the business connections, many of these students actually studied and learned something. As a result they went on to become thorns in the side of the rich.
A classic education teaches you to think outside of yourself. It shows you history as something that must be learned or it will be repeated with the same bad results. It gives you a depth of knowledge that is not threatened by someone who is different, who thinks differently, who comes from a different culture.
When you open up the world for someone, you open up their hearts and minds, and that's where the problem was for the power elite. Instead of business puppets, such purely educated people became activists for the poor, the unfortunate, the victimized. And to the horror of the wealthy, they also began to show others how to get educated, how to earn a scholarship, how to apply for grants, how to set up their own businesses with their own connections.
That's when the second part of the plan went into effect. The educated person began to be mocked, was demonized as an elitist, was portrayed as out of touch with the "ordinary man." Often those who did the mocking did so from their multi-million dollar offices as they drank and ate the best and most expensive of food and drink. They ordered their paid stooges to promote the idea of stupidity as something democratic while intelligence was mocked as elitist and foreign.
This did not happen overnight. It took creating a base who would buy the myth. In order to succeed at the dumbing down of America, the wealthy and the powerful had to do something besides make education expensive and intelligence something to be mocked. They had to make sure people didn't have time to question what they were told.
People began to work more for less money. Where a job once guaranteed a comfortable life for the wage earner and his or her family, now it meant barely surviving and coming home too exhausted for anything but collapsing in front to the television, where they were fed the myth of educated elitism straight from the mouths of tools of the wealthy elitists.
It took a few years but eventually there was a large working class of people who were either poorly educated or who only attended a year or two of college, if they attended at all. Guidance Counselors in High School were there to steer the less "intelligent" to trade schools where they would learn a skill without having to think too much. The dumbing down of America began to succeed quite well.
But no subjegation of a people is complete without the very useful tool of religion. But this wasn't the religion of a few decades ago where people went to church and listened to sermons drawn from the respective holy books. This was religion that was a political arm of the wealthy elite. It was religion that played upon fears, insecurities, bigotry, and anger over having to live like an underpaid mule in order to survive. It was a religion that created deep divisions among people in order to use them some more, because there is no one more easily controlled than someone who hates. All the wealthy had to do was wave the hate carrot under the noses of the church going religidiots and they did their complete and utter bidding, no matter how immoral or unethical it was. Hate has no conscience and that's what made it such a useful thing for the power elite.
Now that the rich and powerful had a nice pool of dumbed down, exhausted, and spiritually terrified sheep, they created the appropriate anti-heroes to enslave them even further. Sarah Palin is the biggest chain around the neck of the dumbed down mules that ever existed. Everyone who wasn't smart enough for college or too lazy to educate themselves until they were, had their role model. She was the typical bad student, the quitter who was too lazy to focus on anything for too long, whether it was staying at one school long enough to actually get an education or finishing up her term as Governor of Alaska.
And she was the perfect tool of the rich because they recognized her greed and lack of ethics and morality as blood kin to their own empty souls. They knew all she cared about was the money and as long as she got rich she would spread as much hate and division as they wanted. Every time she said or did something completely stupid and idiotic, some paid talking head on TV or radio would portray it as a positive, as something that linked her to the "average" citizen.
And the dumb, fearful masses ate it up. No longer did they feel inadequate over their lack of education. It was now a positive to be stupid. No longer did they feel threatened by anyone who looked or believed differently. Bigotry and hate was back in style. And no longer did they realize how completely they were being used by the rich and powerful.
In a few decades Historians will look back on this time and shake their heads at people who took to the streets to demand insurance companies be allowed to abuse them and cheat them, who rose up as one voice to demand their air and water become filthy and unhealthy from lack of regulations, that their food risk poisoning them because corporations didn't believe they were worth spending money on for safety regulations to make sure it didn't.
They will look back in disgust at how easily they let the power elite gut Social Security and let the old and infirm die in the streets, how quickly America became a country filled with orphans begging on street corners, debtors prisons filled to capacity, and arms merchants who periodically lobbied for a new war to clear the streets of "rabble."
They will feel the nausea creeping into them as they study a culture that cared nothing for the less fortunate and worshipped the very masters who ended up destroying them. They will feel the same disgust any civilized person feels when they read about the Inquisition, about Hitler's death camps, about the collapse of the Roman Empire. They will feel this about the country that was once America and now was just another dead empire killed from the rot within.
And every time the Sarah Palins of the world, the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs, the Karl Roves open their mouths, they kick another clump of dirt over the greatness of a country that will continue to decline until it becomes just another example of what happens when the uneducated savages steal the keys and drive everyone into the ditch of ignorance and stupidty.
One of the mistakes people make about me is believing because I'm an Atheist, then I must live in some kind of empty, immoral and inconsequential world. They believe this because religion has created a wall between them and the world beyond things. Unlike those who live behind this wall, I have no problem seeing myself as part of the greater whole that is nature, that is earth and sky, that is me in everything and everything in me.
The believers try and claim this sense of wholeness by calling it "the world god created." To me this is putting oneself in the position of renter on the planet instead of an inseparable part of it. No god created me or any such nonsense. I AM just as a tree is, just as a mountain is.
The advantage to this is huge because it means I can't be disconnected from myself by something as shallow as religion. I can't be led around by prejudices about the world to the point where scientific evidence is dismissed to pacify superstitious nonsense. I can't be swayed by material rewards or pacified by the promise of a life beyond the reality of the present.
That makes me dangerous because if I can't be bought then I am neither for nor against. If I can't give up my ferocious hunger for peace and justice for the lie that my perfect world exists somewhere I have to die to see it, then I become even more dangerous because I am never satisfied with platitudes. I want actions. I want tolerance. I want equality.
Most of the people in this country right now have been fed so much divisive crap they can't even consider anything but their place in the herd. Everything outside it is a threat, complete with color coded fear levels. Everyone who isn't them, who doesn't go to their church, who doesn't believe exactly as they believe, is somehow defective, wrong, or gasp! a socialist leftist terrorist who aspires to nothing more than sitting on a death panel that will get to off grandma.
I don't know if we can ever come together again as a country, as a people, as a nation. Maybe America is still too young. Maybe this country is like a belligerent teenager who has to say no to everything to establish its independence, no matter how much he or she needs what they are rejecting.
We've created these caricatures of human beings in people like Sarah Palin and her Paliban followers. We've scraped the bottom of the human barrel and out came the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Teahadists and their hateful rhetoric fed to them as talking points with no substance to distract them from what their masters want them to believe.
Maybe America is the stupidly materialistic hell where all the dumb people who valued things over anything else, ended up to wallow forever in their misguided ignorance. Maybe we're all dead and this is how it ends, buried in a landfill with all the insignificant crap we were convinced meant true happiness. Maybe hell is that house we over-bought to impress who the hell knows. Maybe hell is everything in that house, in its closets, in its garages that were supposed to buy happiness but failed miserably. Maybe hell is the pile of discarded relationships that lost out to the things mattered more than love. Maybe there really isn't much hope for us as a species. Maybe we're a worthless pile of failed ideology that someday will be studied and used as an example of how not to live a life.
Or maybe we will wake up and realize how badly we've all been manipulated, how efficiently we were taught to hate with no facts to back up the reasons for our hatred. Maybe we'll realize that we allowed ourselves to be led and herded into like-minded groups so we would never become dangerous, never explore outside our comfort zone, never accept anyone different than ourselves, never demand that our leaders lead instead of herd. Maybe one day we will turn off the TV, throw out the hate radio, use the propaganda that passes as newspapers to start a great big bonfire we can dance naked around together and start over as a species.
And maybe, just maybe we'll come to the realization that religion was and always will be the problem. Not god, not spirituality, not dancing naked in the forest, but religion--that evil, dogmatic chain so many willingly strap around themselves. On that day, a whole lot of people will finally understand that the best way to make someone your obedient puppet is to lead them around by their hate, and that religion is what mainlines the hatred directly into the human being. And hopefully the desire to escape, to finally live free and by their own terms, will allow them to throw off the shackles of religion forever and grow that perfect world without having to die first to see it.
