Opinion/Editorial
DUPLICITY
In the script of the movie called The Big Chill, a preacher stands at a lectern viewing those present about the passing of one of their number. He asked the question; “Where did Alex’s hope go?” Although fictional in creation, the expression has real deep meant for the continuing population of the United States. Much of the nation has lost faith in what is presented as truth, fact, or reality. The reason for this is complex and can certainly be partially expressed by uncaring and monetarily voracious mass media. Some of it can be explained as being the fault of the Internet, cell phone communications, and even bad leadership.
But, in an unacceptable and probably unbelievable truth, the real heart of this depressive loss of national faith is because of duplicity and the revelations all our current communications facilities and organizations present different forms of duplicity for any number of reasons. A good example of this, for everyone who drives, is gasoline. Gasoline prices, gasoline amounts for vehicles, gasoline grades of fuel are set by wispy unseen forces, and all are lied about. The prices are fixed, the gallons are almost never full gallons and there is no unleaded, super, and premium…it’s all the same.
Cell phones are another area that helps to understand the complete pervasiveness of duplicity. All the cell phone companies and there are only a few left after major consolidations, claim great cell phone coverage, but none of them really provide it. There is about as much ‘kick back’ about this kind of lying pervasiveness as there is any ability to complain to anyone about gasoline. All complaint departments have been taken out of big companies, including the utilities so necessary to everyone.
Gas stations are owned by people who know nothing about gasoline or less. Our political system has become infected, as well. Now, any loser of an election claims that the election was rigged. The system is attacked so that the system may be torn asunder, to be replaced, of course, by whatever new system is put in place by the complainers. Across the nation, there has proven to be no duplicity in the elective process, but the duplicity is huge in the often and well-published ‘news’ that elections have been stolen.
What happened to create this nightmare of phony data being believed by so many members of the American public? What happened was that people without credentials rose act like they have full rights to think believe and do whatever they want, in fully credentialed areas and almost all others. People without any medical training or education go on binge protesting against vaccines. People without any knowledge of how the government works take up flags, poles, and even guns to attack institutions like the Washington D. C. congressional chambers with wild driven abandon. The problem here is not a failure of communication. It’s a failure in the filtering of information. Wikipedia, the largest source of background information with respect to persons, places, and things, has no real filters. People can write things on there that are vetted by nobody. Facebook and Snapchat and even Twitter try to moderate a hailstorm of lying disinformation submitted by people who have come to admittedly ‘believe and not know.’ Part of the population is this vapidly and retroactively unintelligent.
Duplicity has been sold as reality, time and again, and as opposed to years, decades, and centuries of past human development, it is being sold in an overwhelmingly driven and penetrating way all the time. Night and day, seven days a week and every day of the month, the public is literally bombarded with bad data. Russia is a perfect example of this damaging bad data. That country, as this is written, has about the same gross national product as the state of Texas. It can’t field an army, navy, and air force of any real size to do much of anything, but it’s portrayed as if it is almost equal to the United States in military might. For God’s sake, the country has about as many capable fighter planes as the U.S. has aboard one nuclear aircraft carrier (and the U.S. has eleven, while Russia has none), but the duplicity rolls on. North Korea is another continuing story these days. That country has a gross national product of twenty billion. Vermont, the U.S. state with the lowest GDP of all, has an economy of thirty-two billion. The duplicity about these foreign powers rolls on, and it does so to enrich weapons builders and salesmen and women.
Where is all this crap coming from? It’s coming from people who have come to have a very big, vested interest in the nation living in depression, fear and ignorance. Former presidents of the U.S. now become billionaires. Senators and Congressmen and women all become multi-millionaires in and out of office. This is all about control of information. It’s not the mass media’s fault alone. It’s the fault of all those who support the duplicity, no matter what the reason and that reason is almost always personal enrichment. The nation listens non-stop to people who have no real credentials to be giving out almost any information on any subject that affects the nation. How do we stop the population from accepting total garbage coming from the mouths of professional sports stars, elected officials who have little or no education, and all those who have become able to push themselves forward through the outrageous abuse on the Internet? How is it possible to get the nation’s attention about how it is being led down a path that can only have one anthropologically proven end? Somehow, there has to be created some source, organization, or movement that brings these issues to national recognition.
