Brainwashing, parables, memes and the like...

When I was a kid in the Methodist Church parables were big but they were generally based on some truth. It bothered me that they did not teach that these were fiction. About 1970 whoever took over the churches decided that it was a good way to decontaminate propaganda. In the shocked me to see what they were passing off as truth in my sisters Concerned Women of America or something similar newsletter her evangelical church pushed. Her hubby was a Marine Officer.

Finding myself a single disabled parent who thought I could conquer anything I went to school for biomedical electronics technology. Things I did not know: 1) there was a reason that no woman had graduated and it had to do with a must pass mid term on theory that no matter how you answered if you were a women it was wrong. It was an at your own pace program so you did not take the test with anyone else and they did not give you copies of the questions or your answers because of cheating so it was almost impossible to challenge but I did with the help of two classmates who supported me, one a Vietnam Vet who died from the effects of Agent Orange 6 months later and 2) you could probably not get a job in the field if you did not belong to a certain Evangelical Church. I wrote about this in a much earlier message here. Reagan's policies put the medical device industry in a tail spin and the economy left thousands of experienced engineers and technicians out of work. I did eventually find work outside of the medical industry but even there it was a struggle being female and a single parent.

I was aware of the rightwing think tanks manipulating social issues and the testing of welfare recipients for drug testing because employers do it is an example of how effective that brain washing has been. Someone posted the latest crap on a blog and another said they knew people who used and sold so they thought the law was a good one and I asked why should innocent people be tested when she knew who was abusing and would not turn them in. People jumped in just repeating the meme "if they do it for jobs they should do it for welfare people. The problem there is if you do not get one job because you test positive, I don't think it disqualifies you from trying again but in welfare it does and nobody is on welfare when they have a choice not to be unless they are criminals and then the Constitution needs to be followed and massive drug tests are unreasonable searches. Nobody monitors whether the drug tests are accurate, or if someone can manipulate the data but the people on the blog do not want to think just repeat mindlessly like the folks we see in the Koran schools, Mao, Lenin etc. How do you get there? How can you possibly pay for it with the pittance people get on welfare?

Nobody took my side on the blog. How are we ever going to turn this around? How do I deal with the horror that is our society right now?

that you or I have been taught to believe is bullshit.

#1. The game is rigged. It always has been.

#2. The people who rig the game belong to a very small, exclusive club.

#3. Neither you or I are in the club. In fact, no one I know personally is in it, nor will they ever be.

#4. Morals, ethics, empathy, what you have been taught to believe about right, wrong, truth, justice and the American way do not apply to the folks in the club. They are above the law because they make the law and if they find the law inconvienient, they just change the law.

#5. The people who are in the club own the media. All of it. They own the T.V., the newspapers, the magazines, the radio, All of it and they dictate what you see, hear and are told. Can you imagine a country involved in at least three wars yet there is hardly any mention of it in the media? The folks in the club learned from Viet Nam. The folks who sit on the boards of G.E., Halliburton, Electric Boat, etc are in the club and war is very profitable for them, thus, they have decided that the best way to keep those profits flowing is to make sure we don't hear about what the wars cost. Nothing to see here folks, move along. Oh, LOOK ! Anthony has a wiener!

#6. The folks in the club are very good at what they do. They have been doing it for a long, long time. As long as they can make the peasants believing that who wins Dancing with the Stars is more important than people starving in the streets, as long as they can make us believe that an ignorant, knuckle dragger like Sarah Palin is actually a viable candidate to lead our country, we are screwed.

#7. Playing by the rules means playing by THEIR rules and rule #1 is that the rules don't apply to them.

#8. Untill enough people figure this out, we are screwed.

#9. We are screwed.

I was not always this cynical. There was a time when I believed in the system but the more history I read and the more history I see being made the more I feel like I live in the "Matrix" world. A few of us have figured it out. Most never will.

As one, final example, I offer you Fukushima. When they realized that the levels of radiation being emitted had exceeded the "safe" levels, they simply changed the amount considered safe. When the B.P. oil spill destroyed the entire Gulf of Mexico, they simply told us that everything is fine. Nothing to see here folks.

Not that the OP isn't worth it, but I recc'd this thread in proxy for your response.