BETTER ONE LONE NUT THAN EN ENTIRE PEOPLE OUT TO GET THEM   [PART II]
                                                                   
                                by Neville Raymond

             Members of dysfunctional families are known to go to any lengths to deny that a respected family member is a child molester or a sexual predator.  It takes courage of the highest order to throw away the tissue of self-serving rationalizations and evasions that stand in our way and look squarely at the evidence that is before one’s eyes.  Certainly it is not for the faint of heart!  It is not for those prone to lying down and going along with the spurious comforts of the status quo!  It is not for those who must have quick fixes and easy solutions to appease a desperate need to cling to a shred of sanity.

            The truth is there is nothing harder than acknowledging that a well-liked or trusted uncle is a child molester.  Unless, perhaps, it is acknowledging that our beloved Uncle Sam – whom we are raised to respect from our high-school civics classes and venerate from our first Veteran's Day or 4th of July parade - is in collusion with the dark forces that are out to rape and ravage and ruin us. 

           

            Honestly now, which one of us hasn’t been tempted to drift on the river of denial?   Imagine your state of mind after your eyes had opened to the mountains of evidence proving that the plot to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at the highest levels of government, banking and industry.  

            Wouldn’t it be one hell of a hair-raising epiphany!                                      
            Wouldn’t the trusted pillars of your world buckle and fall like a row of dominoes?  
            Can you really go back to watching your favorite TV reality show or crime drama after experiencing a bombshell like that?   
            Can you wake up and go back to work the next day as if nothing had happened.

           

             Imagine your state of mind after listening to a briefing that leaves not a shadow of doubt that the World Trade Center was leveled by controlled demolition - that the 19 hijackers were dupes and patsies, like Lee Harvey Oswald - and that the guiding force behind 9-11 was the long arm of the national security state.        

             Would you be able to take a load off and relax and make yourself comfortable, even if it is in your own living room?  
             Or would you be reeling from the fact that the iconic authority figures you trusted and believed in with the naiveté of a child have gone the way of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

           

            If you want the reason why the corporate-owned media has been so successful in bamboozling the American public with preposterous narratives of 9-11 and the JFK assassination, look no further, here it is!  People are scared witless of the implications of finding the invisible government guilty of orchestrating these horrific tragedies.  They are terrified of realizing that they are ruled by a criminal syndicate of high-level sociopaths and homicidal thugs.  

            It doesn’t matter how logical that realization may be.  Everyone knows that politicians lie and cheat where the masses are concerned.  Is it that much of a stretch to believe that they engage in mass murder as well?  
            Evidently not.  But the implications, the implications, the implications of it all!  
            If we really believe that a fire has broken out in the theater of American politics that threatens to devour everyone alive, how are we supposed to stay calm and carry on with business as usual!  Do we go home and pop a can of beer and zone out before our favorite TV sitcom?  Do we curl up into a fetal position and let a pack of lying, cheating, murdering psychopaths turn everything we stand for to ashes in our mouth?  Or do we stand on the street corner or climb to the rooftops and open our mouths like something out of an Edvard Munch painting and scream the horrifying news to the world?   

             
             This is what makes debunking the official government line so challenging!  Once we take on board the realization that the government is no longer to be trusted, it means rethinking everything we have been taught about authority figures.  It means reevaluating our concepts about democracy and capitalism, the greed of the powerful and the needs of the people.   
             And who knows, after all that rethinking and reevaluating, it might even mean that the onus is now on us to take charge, to organize, to blaze a path to recovery.  It might mean that the government of the world is now effectively up to us!  It might mean that there is nothing left but for us to deputize ourselves as leaders in our own right and go out and fill the hideous vacuum created by the moral collapse of our institutional leaders! 

           

            That can be a scary and unsettling proposition for anyone, even the best-equipped and most conscious among us.  What about for Americans who are dumbed down by the school system and drilled to keep their heads down and put their noses to the grindstone of corporate America?  For them it must feel downright crazy and terrifying.  Some of us would do anything to get out of feeling that!  And who can blame them if they do - by going along with the official conspiracy to pooh-pooh so-called conspiracy theories that expose the lawless underbelly of the corporatocracy.                
           The great thing about allowing ourselves to be taken in hook, line, and sinker by official explanations of the JFK assassination and 9-11 is that it lets us off the hook.  It doesn't matter how illogical and ludicrous they might be!  As long as we believe in these outlandish official explanations, we don’t have to rise to the personal challenge of believing in our individual selves and in our collective power to actually do something about it!   

             What though there is a weight of scientific evidence to prove that 9-11 was an inside job and that the JFK assassination could only have been carried out with the full resources and complicity of the national security state?  To dismiss the preponderant weight of this evidence is a small price to pay for relieving ourselves of a more pressing weight – you know, the sheer weight of responsibility of getting off our rear ends and stepping up to the plate and doing whatever needs to be done to create a world that doesn't arrest the fulfillment of our potential as a species by perennially banking on threats of danger to advance the agenda of power. 

           

            At the end of the day, that is the ace in the hole of the anti-conspiracy cabal.  
             That is the chief selling point of a corporate mythology that pooh-poohs the evidence that 9-11 is the Reichstag fire of a newly emergent fascist state and that the JFK assassination is organized at the highest reaches of power.  
              That is the beauty of inoculating the populace against so-called conspiracy theories.  
              As long as we can buy into the party line, we can all forget about mobilizing in a white heat of consensual outrage and tamely retreat into our individual shells.  As long as we believe that Oswald or Osama did it, we can be secretly relieved that we dodged the bullet and go back to binge shopping or binge TV watching and act as though nothing is fundamentally wrong! 
             On the surface, America might seem to be a violence-prone aggression-addled, gun-addicted nation, but there are times when Americans seem to fit the psychological profile of women who love too much.  They would rather put up with those plutocratic bad boys who abuse them silly and betray their trust ten ways to Sunday than face the daunting prospect of dumping their treacherous asses and starting over.  
            Or as the Elvis Presley ballad goes, "I'd rather go on believing your lies than living without you."

            
            If we want to fool ourselves about 9-11 or JFK, that's our prerogative.  But let's not fool ourselves about how tough it can be to see these events for what they really are - a clarion call to throw off our victim status and take charge of our collective destiny.  
            Why not come right out and say it?  It's going to take everything we have to stop putting our blind faith in authority figures who have lied and swindled and slaughtered their way into our hearts throughout history.  It's going to take everything we have, and some things we didn't even think we had in us, to walk away from those who have walked all over us for centuries and wake up to the realization that we are the ones we are waiting for! 

           Naturally there is some scared part of us that thinks that it might be better to delay that realization as long as humanly possible.  Better still, couldn't we just put it off indefinitely by being good little citizens and swallowing the Big Lie that the system has our best interests at heart? 

            Sure we could.  But for how much longer?   How unbearably hard must it get for us before we decide not to take the easy way out?  Clearly the system is geared towards working for someone’s best interest.  It's sure as hell not ours.  It's theirs!  And come hell or high water, they are determined to keep it that way.                 
            Which is why they would rather give us to believe that the world’s most powerful plutocracy can be brought down by an occasional loser or kook than give us all the reason we need to come together with a common purpose and bring it down en masse.