|
They Just Don't Want to Know; Of Dissidents and Dissonance.
Like a full-scale papier-mache model of the Earth, the truth is so enormous that it is hard to even comprehend. And once you figure it out, the question becomes where to put it? Because it won't fit on the shelf in the living room. I refer of course to the true reason why Americans are not more concerned at the patent absence of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' in Iraq. I spent, I confess, several weeks waiting for the thunderous uproar that would inevitably follow the equally inevitable discovery that Iraq had no biological agents, no foul chemicals, no missiles capable of circling the papier-mache globe and blowing up Daytona Beach, Florida (or similar). The discovery has been made. You want mustard gas in Iraq, you'd better start eating pastrami. Yet the American public doesn't care. There will be no consequences to the Bush Administration for the naked, baseless savagery it perpetrated upon Iraq's people. Why not? The answer hit me like a full-scale papier-mache model of the Earth: Americans aren't upset about the Big Lie because they never believed it in the first place. They just didn't want to know.
Wow, that's such a cynical idea it makes your skin all crinkly. Can it be that the average American so very much doesn't give a shit what its government does? Can it possibly have gotten this bad? We were until recently known as a generous and friendly people, if loud. Are we in fact the heartless maggots that such a concept would require? It boggles the mind. Where is the public outcry? Why isn't everybody in America going apeshit as the Bush Administration slips into the same "what, me worry?" mode they employed after the failure to snare Osama bin Laden? (Osama, as you probably don't remember was Saddam Hussein's tennis partner. And we remember Saddam Hussein, right?) Why, he asks, restating the question yet again because he can't believe it's even necessary to ask, why is the American public not in an uproar at the administration's slow admission that they lied about the justification for this assault on another nation? The answer, sad to say, is cognitive dissonance.
<snip>
The beauty part of cognitive dissonance is the worse it gets, the more people throw up and say "who cares?" In this way such public works projects as genocide and empire-building can be accomplished, because people refuse to care. It's too damn demanding, too scary, and too damaging to that ever-threatened bird called Self Esteem. But this is the time to take a good long look at your mindset, before things get so awful you find yourself goose-stepping down the Reichsparteitag rather than face the facts. Are you in a state of cognitive dissonance? Does the evidence of your senses not jibe with what you've been told is The Way Things Are? Do you find yourself redefining what is important to exclude what you don't want to believe? Are you angry at people who demand you think about issues you consider closed? Do you often find yourself wondering why everybody but real Americans are wrong? Do you believe there is one set of rules for America and a different set of rules for the rest of the world, and that America should enforce both of them? Are you a red-faced witless baboon?http://www.opednews.com/Tripp_they_just_don.htm
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
