by AlicetheCurious » Sun Sep 25, 2005 7:45 am
Innana, I had to go register on the EZBoard, something I've been resisting, just so I could respond to your post.<br><br>I live in the Middle East; last week, I met a French tourist here, who'd lived as an expat all over the world, and she said something that I found very insightful. She found Americans, almost robotic in their behaviour and opinions, which they seemed to be reciting for a camera rather than expressing their personal thoughts and opinions.<br><br>My mother was disconcerted when, at the end of their visit, her American son-in-law made a "thank-you" speech that was stilted and odd to her. But then, she doesn't watch much American tv, otherwise she'd have recognized it as the kind of speech they have in the last 5 minutes of most sitcoms, where everything is nicely tied-up and the music swells as everybody hugs.<br><br>It's like the cops who are unconsciously imitating tv cops, or the teenagers who imitate teenagers from sitcoms, or the way corporate American has taken all the components of human life (from religion to sex to friendship), processed them, and spewed them back in the form of things that are neither completely genuine, nor artificial. <br><br>Instead of food, we get "food products", like processed cheese and coke ("the real thing???"), that ice-cream with fake fat in it, meat in the supermarkets that is too red, milk that is too white, almost like white paint. From Disney's sterile "Jungle Land" to Bush's speeches, to the "news" to "reality" tv, Americans are bombarded with a world-view that is psychotically divorced from reality.<br><br>Americans are told that they live in a democracy, even while that democracy is eroded beyond recognition by Dieboldt voting machines, the Patriot Act(s), corporate censorship of the public discourse and a government that claims to represent ordinary citizens while bleeding them dry to benefit the interests of the super-rich. A "land of the free" that runs international "gulags" where prisoners are routinely tortured and deprived of their human rights, and where ordinary citizens increasingly fear to speak their minds.<br><br>By a huge margin, the US has the largest GDP in the world, around US$ 11.7 trillion, but in terms of quality of life, it ranks 10th in the world. Its per capita GDP ranks 4th in the world (after the tiny British Virgin Islands and Luxembourg, and Norway), so we're talking about a LOT of money, but only 22nd among developed countries in terms of healthy life expectancy at birth and SECOND in terms of child poverty. I could go on, but you can check for yourself at the website: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nationmaster.com.">www.nationmaster.com.</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>So how much of this is part of the national discourse? Does anyone ask why the US is "the greatest country on earth"? If nobody is asking, why aren't they? <br><br>So, why exactly is the US occupying Iraq? To save Iraqis? Has anyone asked Iraqis what THEY want?<br><br>According to FAIR, check their website, it's excellent (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2469):">www.fair.org/index.php?page=2469):</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>"But most Iraqis want the U.S. military out of their country -- pronto. As Newsweek reported in its Jan. 31 edition: "Now every major poll shows an ever-larger majority of Iraqis want the Americans to leave." Yet we hear that U.S. troops must stay for the good of the Iraqi people -- even though most of those people clearly want U.S. troops to leave. (Are we supposed to believe that Americans know better than Iraqis whether American troops should stay in Iraq?)<br><br>To paper over such illogic, a media-stoked myth tells us that getting out of Iraq is a notion remaining outside the boundaries of what the U.S. public could take seriously. Most politicians and pundits insist that it's off the table."<br><br>Forgive me for going on and on, but what I'm trying to say is that "normal" for Americans is looking more and more like "psychotic" to those who cling to rationality and the facts. In such a context, if you are a thoughtful, informed individual, it's natural that you would feel somewhat isolated and wonder if you're the crazy one. But first, please decide for yourself if it's crazy to ask the questions, or is it crazy to avoid answers because they don't conform to the programme?<br><br>I guess you're faced with a choice -- you can lobotomize yourself, either by dumbing yourself down and stifling your curiosity or by taking "your" meds, or you can choose to be alive in the truest sense: welcoming the pain and the sadness, because if you numb one part you numb all of yourself and become incapable of joy as well. Instead of who you are, you get something else: a "processed" person, sort of like "processed cheese food", part of the Pepsi Generation. <br><br>Please, if you want to stay sane, seek out other sane people, avoid brainwashed individuals who refuse to face uncomfortable facts, and KEEP AWAY FROM THOSE MEDS. <br><br> <p></p><i></i>
