Opinion/Editorial
THE TOWERING INFERNO OF MISPLACED BELIEF
Nine eleven. Those two words, or three numbers, will forever resound with a strength they should never have been given. With a body of fearfulness, self-blame, and loathing we should never have allowed to escape from our body politic or social consciousness. Instead of turning outward and ferociously applying our might we turned inward and attacked our very own. Today, twenty-three years later, we humiliate ourselves whenever we want to fly. We cower before the police or any other authority. We worry that evil is around the next corner or bend in the road. We are conditioned to fear as our primary motivator. None of this has happened by accident. It has happened through willful diligent planning.
Whatever forces brought down the World Trade Center buildings, and I have no idea of what those were, they were intricately planned and carried out. The administration in power here at the time seemed to be like a receiver on the football field waiting for the ball. The ball was thrown, caught, but then the receiver turned and ran to the opposite goalpost. Because we’ve lost a huge amount since nine eleven. There was no great worry about our economy crashing back then. It was unthinkable. Now, we’ve gone through two of these events in three years. And we’ve been quite handily set up by our leadership and the media to expect many more occasions of similar domestic terror.
Quite likely, however, the greatest suffering we have faced as a country is the deliberate narrowing of our thought process. We have been conditioned since nine eleven to look inward. To think small. To accept the fact that we have extreme and serious limits to our power and our thought process. The ending of our Space Program is the penultimate example of this kind of thinking. We thought hugely in the sixties, of going to places beyond our ability to imagine. We thought of occupying other planets and worlds. We thought in terms of Star Wars and Star Trek. Since 9/11 we think in terms of the rise of another singing star, dancer, or clothing designer. Our television shows, like Mad Men, take us back in time, as do our movies like Captain America. We rewrite history, like in Inglorious Bastards, and are not even aware it is rewritten to make it more acceptable. We look at and speak of the past and present while remaining quietly fearful of the future.
Much of our thought process is shaped by mass media. The filters in place to ensure a message satisfactory to the seven owners of that mass media have been manipulated. The Rupert Murdoch scandal is revealing just how much manipulation is taking place, although this scandal is being as minimized as mass media can make it. They understand that our knowing what has happened with Fox and his news circle applies to them and they must make sure we never figure that out.
The Internet is the only outlet of mass media that remains open and free. They will come for this outlet, as they are providing through a ten million dollar grant to the Pentagon to begin understanding how to ‘control’ potentially damaging ‘attacks.’ Those attacks will come more than likely after the writing of people like me. It is only a matter of time. Can the Internet be effective enough in breaking the bonds of this mass media filtering process to preclude corporate dominance of it?
That answer is no. A resounding no.
Billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter and turned it into a fascist mud pit, and himself into almost a superhero villain in the process. Zuckerberg of Facebook, the Internet inside the Internet, has done the same. Anonymity has been allowed to pervade the entire Internet. Freedom has become what the song lyrics pointed out so many years ago, “just another word for something left to lose.” Supposedly anonymous individual trolls are allowed to punish any outspoken voices. The owners of the social media sites are not allowed to be sued. The president of the United States is given immunity for any of his official duties, like having people assassinated with drones. Who knows anymore?
Young people are rising, however, tired of the ‘old guys’ running everything. Women are finally getting together as the largest voting bloc in history. If votes can be allowed and counted, and then certified…well, there is hope. The insanity of America’s response to 911 may be about to be recovered from, or at least a start in heading toward that recovery.
