Ignorant and Indoctrinated, Not Necessarily Stupid
Sometimes I think that I am one massive ball of outrage.  I feel constantly poked, prodded, pushed, punched, and pricked, almost without cessation. If it’s not the daily dose of propaganda on the news wire from AP to CNN to Newsweek to NBC and all alphabets in between, then it’s confronting a culture of corruption that is growing exponentially as our morals and values decline into a relativistic morass.
I hear almost daily, our version of The Great Leader, blathering on about how we need to share the wealth, and that he empathizes with the vermin who defecate on police cars and demand a free ride on my dime.  And that the so called 1% have a moral obligation to prostrate themselves to these malcontents.  Or brilliant Biden telling the country that if Republicans have their way, rape and murder will skyrocket, all while poking a finger in the face of an independent journalist and telling him “Don’t screw around with me!†when he was asked if he thought it was appropriate to curb the excessive rhetoric.  I mean it. This happens EVERY day these days.
Then I am greeted with the various tattooed, pierced, foul mouthed, attitude exuding human beings in the grocery store, the mall, my neighborhood. Or the Boom, Boom, Boom of the woofer and the REEEN, REEEN, REEEN, of de-muffled Honda Civics hyped up on Nitrous Oxide or whatever they are putting in them to turn their engines into rev heaven.  And I wonder, what kind of a job will you ever be able to get when you look and behave like something out of an old Mel Gibson/Tina Turner movie.  And then the terrifying realization comes to me, I will likely be paying for them. They may never grow up.
I wish this were hyperbole. I really wish I were exaggerating. But I’m not. These are real quotes from our real “leaders.â€Â   This is the picture of America that is becoming the norm.   And it’s offensive to me, deeply offensive.  I am still a few years from retirement, and yet I feel like a curmudgeon.  It wouldn’t matter if I were 30.   The speed of our decline is breathtaking … or breath-removing as the case may be.
I suppose I am overreacting a bit.  It’s not that anyone has shown up at my door to relieve me of my “wealth,†yet.  Or that someone has strapped me in a chair and forced me 24/7, to watch and learn from Rachel Maddow or Lady Gaga.  But increasingly, I am finding civility, impartiality, decency, truth, character, judgment, and wisdom, impossible commodities to locate.
Somewhere along the way, character stopped counting.  Objective moral truth, disappeared.  Occasionally when I am not running my rear end off (figuratively of course, my waist size does not support the allegation), I hear Dennis Prager for a few minutes on the radio between destinations, and it is like a breath of fresh air.
When did this happen? When did we become a nation of immature children?  A week or so ago, I was horrified watching a 60+ something fellow doing the wild man dance, without shirt or shoes at a public food event, in front of the stage. I looked over at my 15-year-old stepson, and he was shaking his head.  I was speechless, except to tell him, that when I was his age, this was something you never would have seen.  I realized once again, here was more evidence that unlike the song American Pie, the music didn’t die, but maturity did.  The grown-ups have died.
We are sheep, I was reminded recently. And good shepherds are hard to come by. These days, we elect them by how cool they look and what color they are, instead of what they are made of structurally and internally.  Whom they associate with, and how they behave is no longer relevant. Their experience and track record in the “real world†doesn’t matter.  How do they look or sound?   How do they do on The Tonight Show and Letterman. Can they play the saxophone? Is Jay Z on their iPod.  OMG, they have an iPod.
Our current leadership is the most dysfunctional collection of corrupt ideologues in the history of this country, and they are having an effect on the population. They are Jimmy Carter gone wild, only much, much worse.  They are counting on the ignorance of the American people.  They are betting on it.  And they are “all in.â€
They have enjoyed a nearly unobstructed takeover of the education system, the mass media, and the entertainment culture for most of the last 40 years, and they are counting on demographics to keep them in control of the narrative.   They have built a constituency on the basis of identity politics and have duped a large proportion of the ethnic population into accepting their role as helpless victims who cannot make it on their own.  They have convinced the GenX, Y and whatever’s nexters, that Government is the only thing between them and the abyss of barbaric medievalism.   They have rewritten the history books and turned Western philosophy and Judeo-Christian values, into a narrative recasting it as imperialistic, racist, greed-mongering, hypocritical tyranny. White is black, up is down.
In short, they are trading on ignorance, and they are getting good return on their investment.
The latest “movement†(pun intended) OWS, is a collection of the worst of the worst.  It is the monster that Frankenstein created.    People urinating on cars and defecating on the doorsteps of the surrounding neighborhoods, drugs, public sex, the worst kind of filth coming out of their mouths.
But among them, are some folks who couldn’t identify with the Tea Party.  They were put off by the Right and the Tea Party, which was successfully made “uncool†and “bad†by the establishment media and culture.   But these independents, for lack of a better term, know something is wrong.  They participated in the Occupy movement, because they had nowhere else to go.  They are prisoners of the Lefty narrative, but somewhere inside of them, they know that bailouts are not right.  They know that selected corporations getting huge taxpayer-funded loans, is not right.  They inherently understand that “too big to fail†has created a hierarchy that never existed in this country before.  It made certain industries and certain companies free of consequences.  And in doing so, it destroyed the moral imperative of personal responsibility and accountability.  It said in effect, what’s sauce for you, oh taxpayer, oh small business owner, oh everyday person, is most definitely NOT sauce for the gander.
It remains to be seen whether they come to understand that you don’t clean up the river by going downstream.   You have to go to the source of the toxicity, which is Washington DC.
Maybe, when they have spent some time in the muck of the Occupy movement, or hear one more elitist lie out of Washington, they will figure it out.  Just because they have been indoctrinated, doesn’t necessarily mean they are stupid.
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I think it was about 16 years ago I read a commentary. Don’t remember exactly what it was about. But, in it the writer ask a priest what he had learned over the years from the confessions he had heard. The priest said what he had drawn was that most people don’t grow up. Don’t know how old the priest was. I’d assume middle age. This says this phenomenon has been going on for awhile. I think the reason for this is some sort of trauma. It retards emotional development. With each successive generation, and with society’s perversity evolving, traumatic events are more common. Divorce, same-sex parents, sexual molestation and the absent parent(s) would qualify as such. I would posit that most in the OWS crowd, and millions of a similar ilk, live in a child-like, make believe world. Where aside from gravity, there are no natural or even economic laws. Where, like that imaginary friend, you can just create things out of thin air. Money, for instance. It’s harmless. There is no pain in Wonderland. You can forgive debt. It doesn’t cost anybody anything. No one is cheated. There is no theft. They are looking for a Messiah — that father figure — who will embrace them. Hold them close and make the trauma disappear. Worldly people have told them that the one true Messiah is a fantasy. But the one thing they do know deep in their hearts, is that He does exist. They confirm it with their perpetual search. They thought they had found him in 2008. But he turned out to be Judas. Betrayal. Yet more trauma. This calls for another tattoo, another cut, another coat of black nail polish to match the color of their souls. The search continues. For now, they’ll just have to accept the cold, unsatisfying embrace of the State, as as they nestle up to its bosom. It’s a false security. But don’t tell them that. Reality is traumatic.
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Erich Sielaff Reply:
October 25th, 2011 at 10:04 am
We have devolved morally away from our Creator, and evolved structurally into the richest society (even for the “poor”) of any country in the history of the planet. Never has so much been enjoyed by so many. There has been no natural conflagration for us to endure, no monumental tragedy or war. (Consider that the last 35 years all “wars” combined, have cost less than 1/10 of the casualties in the three day battle of Gettysburg alone). Nothing demanded of us, nothing to test our mettle or strengthen our character. As Moses learned when he led his people out of captivity, we don’t do “plenty” well. Instead of a sense of obligation and a profound gratitude that we owe our freedom and our comforts to our forebears for the sacrifices that they made, we evaluate in a vacuum, with no humility. We whine and grouse over so-called “injustice” and spit on what those recast “villains” of industry, commerce and science made possible for us. (Not to mention our soldiers and warriors) The concept of enlightened self interest, which is the best meld of freedom, capitalism, initiative and a moral compass, is completely absent from the fat, sucking, stinking babies who wander the streets and curse and defecate on their inheritance.
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Erich, I appreciate your words and the effort it took to organize and write them down. I hope it is true: “Just because they have been indoctrinated, doesn’t necessarily mean they are stupid.”
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Erich, Raymond Ibrahim, author of The Al Qaeda Reader, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Here is an excerpt, which speaks to your points, from one of his columns in The Middle East Review:
“The lesson? To understand grand scale events, stop focusing on individuals
“To the many who think that America’s problems begin and end with Obama, consider the logic of the following quote, attributed to a Czech newspaper:
The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting an inexperienced man like him with the presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.”
“In short, individual leaders do not cause societies to become what they are; rather, these leaders are symptoms — reflections — of their respective societies.”
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Erich Sielaff Reply:
October 25th, 2011 at 10:08 am
Quinn, that quote is staggering and sobering. And right on the money. That is the problem and the decadent institutions that have spawned these miscreants are at the root of the problem. The indoctrination of a generation has birthed this false Messiah.
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The fools of whom you speak are the very same ones who chose W, a juvenile until he was 45 and a man who, given the circumstances of his privileged life, was shockingly unprepared and unqualified for the job. Then look at Clinton – where do we start with him? This has been going on for at least two generations, and it’s no wonder it’s going in one direction. That was and is the plan by both elected and shadow government that has perpetuated the illusion of choice for decades, while using their positions to usurp the Republic with “regulations” that serve no one but themselves and the multinational corporate cronies who serve and benefit from career politicians. The citizenry didn’t elect Obama because he was the best person for the job; they elected him for the same reason they’ve been electing presidents and congressmen now for decades; he appeared to be the lesser of two evils chosen by corporate interests and supported by a neutered and sycophantic media. They may not be stupid, but the indoctrination campaign we laughingly call our public education system has deprived them of the ability to value reason, logic, freedom or personal responsibility. We have been the proverbial frog in the pot and the water is starting to boil….
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Erich Sielaff Reply:
October 25th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
I think you have hit it on the head. Obama was just the natural last number of the progression. This is likely our last chance to rally. Frankly, I have been saying that I am beginning to think that 4 more years of Obama may be preferable to going back to sleep under an establishment Republican Congress and Executive Branch. The cancer just slows down, but its not removed. We have to go to war on the aforementioned institutions and hope there is enough time to reverse the “water temperature”. Alas, “waking up” is hard to do…..
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Footnote: Reports I read this morning indicate that Mr Biden has decided to investigate the journalist and perhaps pull his credentials for putting him on the spot. I guess Joe meant it when he said “don’t mess with me”. I am surprised that our juvenile 2nd in command didn’t supply the playground rejoinder “Make me!”
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No. They really are idiots. I’m dealing with morons plenty old enough to have avoided PC indoctrination. Sad truth, most people just go along with the herd. Doesn’t matter in the least that today’s group consensus is 180 deg from that of fifty years ago. They’re stupid, completely untrustworthy and fickle. If I were you, I’d get some tattoos and learn how to style my hair outlandishly so as not to be identifiable as rational and mature.
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Erich Sielaff Reply:
January 6th, 2012 at 5:36 pm
Dear bitter: Hard for me to argue with you, I am trying desperately to hold on to the better angels of our nature……sadly, that is a difficult case to make. I think I will pass on the piercings and tatts though. And its too late for my hair.
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