January 15, 2009

Looking Back


I have a little book of American Indian quotes at home. One of them is from Chief Lone Wolf, who said something like this:
"I have learned that a man cannot accomplish any great deeds on his own, without the help of others."
Despite the friendships I made along the way, I always felt very alone throughout this whole endeavour. Looking back now, nearly six years since I first started blogging, I realise that in fact there were plenty of other people saying what needed to be said.

At the time, I thought that I had to keep shouting and shouting and shouting, because if only everybody could hear the horrible truth, something would be done about it. It drove me to the point of madness, in some respects, and I apologise if I sometimes vented my anger or verbally abused anyone from pure frustration.

Now I realise that most people without power simply did not want to know the truth, and most people with power were simply not prepared to do anything about it.

Of course, there were exceptions. And somehow the whole horrible truth eked its way out into the collective consciousness.

But I can't help thinking that it was the disasters - Katrina, Iraq, Wall Street - that really got people's attention, not the voices of reason, who were mostly limited to reading one another on the Internets.

If Iraqis had meekly succumbed to their new masters, if New Orleans never got flooded, if the great Ponzi scheme was still floating, would anybody even care about the rest of it?

2 comments:

Bukko Boomeranger said...

And somehow the whole horrible truth eked its way out into the collective consciousness.

I reckon you're entirely too charitable toward the collective consciousness. From the comments I read on various sources, there are a lot of people who still don't get it; who are resisting as hard as they can to avoid getting it.

(And I don't just mean Dick Cheney. He gets it. And he's going to lie to anyone's face about it, just daring them to call him on his bullshit. He's the one who should be smother-bagged to force him to admit the truth. And if water torture made his pathetic shriveled heart stop, well what the heck -- mistakes were made...)

But getting back to my point, don't underestimate the 48% of the American people (if the official figures are to be believed) who would still vote "R" in spite of the debacle. Even if they concede something has gone wrong, which many don't, they blame the "liberals" or the media or someone else not of their faction. And lots of other people just regard the unfolding crisis as a temporary stutter in the path of progress, or an unavoidable event like a natural disaster. They have not learnt the lesson that the fault was within us, that we are all responsible.

The ignorant ones may be in the minority. I hope so. But there is still enough of a critical mass of ignorance within America (although not here, I hope) that it can drag down the intelligent ones. More will learn as the grinding misery unfolds, year after year after "Please God make it stop!" year. But sad to say, it won't be until the current crop of humanity is all dead that there's any hope for a lifting of the fatal delusion. Only when a generation has been raised and educated, free of the false mentality that now grips us, will new thinking truly take hold.

Jaraparilla said...

I'm not really being charitable, Bukko - I am saying these people just don't care until it affects THEM.

And even then, like you say, they prefer to make excuses and blame someone else rather than admit they were wrong.

Maybe it's a generational change thing that needs to happen. As you see with your own family, children are great at picking up on their parents mistakes (as long as they choose not to repeat them).

Let's hope the sins of the fathers don't become the sins of the sons! We've seen enough of that Chez Bush.

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