In
1966 I was a college student in Queens, New York. It seemed apparent to me and
many of my friends that the war in Vietnam was a mistake. We felt compelled to
participate in protests in New York and in Washington, DC. We did not think of
our actions as any big deal. We were doing what we could to change governmental
policy. In the intervening years that passion and awareness appears to have
entered into a comatose state across America.
In his book, "1984",
George Orwell made popular two terms that appear to have become our norm. Those
terms were, "doublespeak" and "doublethink." Orwell did not
invent these terms but he made masterful use of them in his novel. "Doublespeak
is language which pretends to communicate but doesn't. It is language which
makes the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, the unpleasant seem
unattractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids, shifts or
denies responsibility; language which is at variance with its real or purported
meaning. It is language which conceals or prevents thought. William Lutz,
"Doubts About Doublespeak." State Government News, July 1993.
Examples of doublethink from Orwell's
book are: "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of
Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty
with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result
from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink"... "Until
they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled
they cannot become conscious."..." Power is in tearing human minds to
pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing."
For the past
four or five years all we have heard is that our deficit is the biggest threat
to our well-being. We have been told that there is no money to repair our
infrastructure or to provide school lunches or adequate healthcare. In fact the
Republican Congress has voted 40 times to repeal Obamacare. It is as if Obamacare
is allowed to continue we will all die a slow agonizing death. It also appears
that once Obamacare is repealed the next biggest threat to our national
interest is National Public Radio. The runners-up appear to be making sure that the poor and minorities lose their voting rights, ensuring that the minimum wage never goes up and the abolition of all trade unions.
Our esteemed
leaders are now debating whether or not we should "punish Syria." Of
course we should be aghast at the use of any weapons. But I find it curious
that the rest of the world finds it so easy to sit back and watch us "take
care of it." Wouldn't it be fascinating if in a few years we learn that
the chemicals in our food have killed and maimed far more people than anything
done by Bashar al-Assad.
In the world
of doublespeak we have a president who has won the Nobel Peace Prize while at
the same time ordering a surge of troops in Afghanistan. The following figures
may not be exactly accurate but I do believe they are fairly close. There were
2996 people killed in America as a result of the attacks on 9/11/01. Since then
3274 coalition troops have been killed in Afghanistan along with approximately
17,000 Afghans. Over 8000 coalition troops have been killed in Iraq and the
civilian estimates are between 200,000 to over 1 million. During this time
period we had fired over 2000 cruise missiles. The estimates for the cost of
one cruise missile go up to $1,400,000 apiece. When I used my calculator to total this it just read "E" because the number of zeros exceeded my display. And this total is just a very small percent of all the costs associated with war. Remember we can't afford to feed
our children. We can't afford to provide healthcare. It may be the case that the zombie apocalypse has already happened as manifested by the silence of all the parents whose gorgeous children have been maimed while "protecting us." These same children get inadequate healthcare and they can't get jobs once they come home.
It isn't
exactly clear what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have actually provided for
us. We are told that Al Qaeda is in ruins. But 13 years later we have
instability all over the Middle East. Terrorist attacks have occurred in the Philippines,
Bali, and numerous other places around the world. Many believe that the prison
in Guantánamo has resulted in far more youth all over the world being recruited
into the ranks of those that hate what we have done. I also find it quite
ironic that the war in Iraq did not result in America controlling Iraqi oil and
the first mining contract in Afghanistan has been awarded to China. Why aren't the Tea Party geniuses screaming that we can't afford another war?
In 2008 I wept tears of joy when Obama was elected. In true doublespeak fashion the man who was going to bring change and the end of the abuses of the Bush administration now has the NSA checking the contents of our farts to see if we have ever eaten hummus.
In 2008 I wept tears of joy when Obama was elected. In true doublespeak fashion the man who was going to bring change and the end of the abuses of the Bush administration now has the NSA checking the contents of our farts to see if we have ever eaten hummus.
Our schools
produce children that don't know how to make change if the cash register is
broken. Our children have the attention span of 140 characters. A few days ago
the British Parliament said no to Britain's participation in Syria. I was able
to watch that live because my cable network carries AlJazeera. No American
network covered it live. We appear to have the best government that money can
buy. I wonder what it will take to wake us out of our coma.
Posts
I feel as you do. And as someone living in Canada I think America being the worlds policeman is a mistake. However, apparently this is all a familiar cycle. At the end of the 19th and early part of the 20th century, "the rich got rich and the poor got children" ("Ain't we got fun?") As individuals we can only add our ripples to the whirlpool.
ReplyDeleteI too shed tears when Obama was originally elected in 2008. However, we now find that we actually ended up electing a moderate Republican rather than a progressive.
ReplyDeleteOne of Obama's very early acts was to sign into law the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act yet since then Obama has waged an all out war on government whistle blowers. Snowden and Manning, while their actions or method thereof may not have been legal or admirable, they ultimately revealed that our government doesn't really consider the values laid out in the Bill of Rights or the laws defined by congress. I find the irony to be almost palpable in Obama being a constitutional lawyer yet he disposes of this document as needed.
I truly appreciate your reference to George Orwell's 1984, it is one of my all time favorites. We are indeed approaching some kind of dystopian Orwellian future it seems and with the advent of the Tea Party, and really since 9/11, we have been pushing the proverbial gas pedal to the floor. We have distorted and/or ignored the warnings laid out by our own forefathers. We are sacrificing all that we held so proud, our individual liberties, due to a nonsensical fear of the unknown. We allow the TSA to grope, molest, and steal from us so that we may feel safer on that airplane. We disregard the pure fact that the TSA has been shown to be horribly inadequate at their job failing repeatedly to find contraband when smoke tested.
We have police fighting the use of cameras by citizens due to the fact the camera phone has brought on us a burgeoning reality that we are approaching a police state. Our "civil servants" are seemingly immune to prosecution or even dismissal despite repeated overreach and many times outright and intentional abuse of their powers. We have the mayor of NYC fighting the idea of police wearing cameras which doesn't compute unless he privately acknowledges that "his army" is acting out of turn and supports that and even wants to perpetuate it by lending them protection.
We have domestic and international security agencies that are spending billions of dollars developing the ability to spy on its own citizens. They have the ability to look into anyone's e-mail and store it through PRISM but when asked to retrieve their own e-mail's they say they do not have the capability to do so and we let them off with a pass. We hear that if we aren't doing anything wrong there shouldn't be any cause for us to be concerned about our communications being monitored. It is entirely disregarded that if we aren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't be monitoring us in the first place, what happened to that notion?
We, as a country, have simply changed who the boogeyman is but no one has woken up to it yet. As you say, we are still in a coma. Our boogeyman has become our own government and our insatiable desire for perceived safety from the illusionary "terrorists" that want to take away our way of life. We are so far willing to divest ourselves of personal liberty and are still bobbing towards the bottom of the barrel for which liberties we actually must cling to. If the goal of these terrorists were to fundamentally change the fabric of American society toward a more conservative and monolithic entity they have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations. Was Osama really that much of a genius that he knew should he be able to penetrate the seemingly thin veneer of American's collective security blanket that we'd turn on ourselves like a trapped animal and chew off our own legs? I must posit that he was a genius or at least incredibly lucky...
David and Josh, thank you for taking the time to respond. I welcome the opportunity to learn how people react to my posts. Anyone have Ted Cruz's e-mail address? Bob
ReplyDelete