Indoctrination in the Dogma of Sameness
In the years that have passed since the end of WWII, the people of the United States have been subjected to mind control indoctrination by the those who run the country. I am not talking about the government, for those in government have been subjected to the same indoctrination, even when it looked like they were doing the work. In the over 60 years that have passed, since the end of the last "good war," that saw a nation of compassionate and empathetic people use the most terrible weapons designed to rain violence down on those who started the war in a volume that vastly exceeded their ability to do the same. We entered the war, it was because we had been attacked and not an pre-emptive action as earlier wars, WWI, Philippine Insurrection, Spanish American War, the extermination campaigns against the Indigenous people of the United States and the Mexican American War. We were a nation who had pulled ourselves up collectively from the depths of a great depression by looking to each other's needs. We went into the war as a nation of Social Populists and came out a nation of Capitalists defending the right of the few to have more than the many.
In the intervening years, the idea of collective responsibility, a gospel of compassion and empathy for the downtrodden has been under attack. The campaigns against healthcare in the 90's and 00's are testament to the success of that attack. The idea of obtaining justice or economic redress has been twisted where old ladies who suffered grievous third degree burns from boiling coffee are the enemy and corporations whose deliberate policies led to those injuries are the protectors of society. Medical Malpractice claims, are now infamous and the blame for skyrocketing healthcare costs; which is pretty amazing since even at the height of these claims, they amounted to less than .35% of all civil suits in the United States. Doctors and hospitals are allowed to commit murder without fear of criminal prosecution and civil prosecution in the 21st century. Dying in a hospital because of infections has become common, and is not discussed at length with at most a shrug of the shoulders. Social Security that beacon of hope passed into law when the nation was in the depths of the depression, has been under steady attack since day one and now is being partially blamed for our nation's deficit. The other villain is Medicare passed by Congress in the wake of a new emphasis on social responsibility in the middle '60's. Both of these social programs are not part of the discretionary budget that is passed by congress. They have a revenue stream going into them separate from the taxes that are part of the congressional budget, but a deficit commission appointed by the President named them the primary areas to cut and redesign or reform, why?
It's like the quote attributed to the late Jim Rhodes, a four term Governor of Ohio, who responded when asked why he always cut mental health funding, "They don't vote." Most of those who are on Social Security and Medicare do not have a voice, or if they do like AARP, the words that come out don't really serve the interests of the poor but of the more affluent members of that organization, who are largely white, and middle class. Those organizations who were the ombudsmen of the poor, like ACORN have been attacked and rendered feeble by a campaign of lies and deceit, that we willingly believed because after all they were those "people." Now in the second decade of the 21st century, government, and public servants are under vicious attack.
Teaching, the most noble of callings is now attacked as the cause of the failure of our educational system and this has been successful. Instead of questioning the funding system that puts the burden on the backs of home owners and that gives generous exemptions to those who can afford to shoulder this burden with the least amount of effort. We question those who are in the classroom, trying to stem a flood of ignorance and dumbing down. That is becoming the norm in a system that values "rote learning" so that students can pick "C," on testing protocols that put the pressure on the school while getting the pressure off the politicians in Columbus. The byproduct being students who do not really understand why they should pick "C." The result is a sheep like mentality that is more interested in acquiring things, and not thinking about the process that provides those things. In this, I can see also the result of the homogenation of religion, especially the Christian religion that has become commodified, and is now part and parcel of the capitalist system. This is from a indoctrination approach used by the new churches, and that was also evident in those years after WWII to attack Godless Communism. This single-minded idea of belief was endemic in fundamentalist and mainstream churches during the cold war.
I was raised up in a fundamentalist church down in the hills. I loved the people who went to church there, but I was never convinced that heaven was only going to have the hundred or so souls that attended it, as was the dogma taught in Sunday School and Church. Also there seemed to be a competition in the congregation as who could profess the greatest love for God and Jesus. The same could be said for praying, as every Sunday, there were quite a few who blasted out the windows of the Church with their appeals to heaven and a small number who quietly contemplated God and Jesus. There was also a great pressure on everyone to go to the altar and reaffirmed your salvation in Christ, each Sunday. It was almost un-American to not perform this act, as if it was a loyalty oath to the nation and the church, whichever comes first. I had a school teacher who attended church who would patrol the back pews where most of the young people sat, asking each of us if we wanted to go to the altar. Since she was a teacher at the grade school I attended, I would trot up to the altar and earnestly pray for forgiveness for the sins that I had committed the past week. It was a show that got me off of the hook but eroded my personal ideas of that church. I started sitting in the front pew, and surprisingly that action took the heat off of me from the salvation patrol, who were busy twisting arms of my peers in the back pews.
The constitution gives each of us the right to practice their beliefs as they see fit. Thomas Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus considering him to be a prophet like Isaiah. He called himself a primitive Christian after those who professed belief in Christianity in the 80 years after Jesus' crucifixion and wrote his own bible by taking those passages from the bible that he agreed with. Jefferson once said on the freedom to practice your beliefs; "It does me no harm if my neighbor worships a rock or a tree." In other words, the freedom to practice is just that; freedom and not having to fear what others think, believe or say about it.
We have seen the freedom to organize come under attack from all quarters. Now we are seeing that the freedom to disagree, the other part of the freedom to practice, is coming under attack. There are those in congress that would like to take away our right to dissent and to express it. John McCain, who should of all people understand the importance of dissent, has sponsored legislation to make it a crime to criticize the government or those in government on the social networks of today. If this becomes law, what is next? Will we have a morality police like in Iran and in the former Taliban Regime in Afghanistan?
Unfortunately, there are no back pews or front pews in which we can take cover to avoid what is coming down the aisle. It will have to be the acts of those who are not afraid of condemnation by the mob.
