Insane
Conspiracy
“I
have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the
US is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing
industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological
powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public
interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set
their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching
our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in
decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true, we
slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Carl
Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World, c. 1995)
When I read
my news feed yesterday, one of the articles was about Q-Anon followers who
believe, apparently, that democrats drink the blood of children to boost their
own immune powers and fuel longevity. When I hear things like this, half of my
brain is in disbelief, and the other half is horrified that there are truly
people living all around me who believe such stuff. I want to push it away and
say, no way! No one could possibly take that seriously, but apparently, they
do. And several Q-Anon followers are now sitting in our House of
Representatives. How can this be?
Carl
Sagan was prescient about many things, including this. He saw where we were headed
and tried to warn people. I can’t speak to this beyond saying that somehow,
these incredibly off-base conspiracy-theorists are a product of the dumbing
down of our educational system. Because we have decided that certain subjects are
too challenging—science and higher math and classical literature—that every
child should get a trophy just for being alive, and no one should be allowed to
fail at anything, we have rendered ourselves ignorant, functionally illiterate,
and therefore, vulnerable to predators of every stripe. We are teaching
children how to pass tests and not how to think critically, nor to question,
deduce, and make their own decisions based upon facts and truth. If we have
doctors who do not believe in science, and teachers who think that demons are
possessing people, and if we truly believe there are—only among democrats, of
course—pedophile rings gathering children’s blood for drinking purposes, then
Carl Sagan’s predictions have already come true.
Right now, we have Dr. Fauci,
whose skills and knowledge are without equal, asking people to get vaccinated and continue to wear
masks because a pandemic that has already killed more than three-million people
worldwide is heating up again. Yet, there are folks out there refusing to be
vaccinated, and still saying the whole covid-thing is a hoax so the government can
chip and track us, then somewhere, we took a left turn and fell off a cliff.
I suppose my question is,
can we right this ship? Can we stop all our mindless busyness long enough to
pay attention to what is going on? Can we challenge this insanity within our
government, and our schools, and our communities? I want to do my part, don’t
you?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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