My first time “scratching the surface” was with religion. I mean, to a lot of people, that’s quite an easy thing to pick on, and pick apart. It’s not exactly “rocket science” to say you don’t believe in God for this or that reason. However, it was about 4 years ago that I, while perusing my very own MySpace page, read that I was Catholic, and decided to investigate the matter.
On my internet journey, I started out just reading about Catholics and the beliefs held by the Church. Since I treated religion as an obligation, much like education, I was apathetic towards it. By the time I was old enough to care about it, and thus learn about it, it was a practice in disillusionment. Virgin births? Please. Rising from the dead? Healing the blind? Obviously Jesus has a lot of explaining to do. After some months of alienating myself from some people, I’m sure, and further research into religion, I eventually accepted that I had disproved it, and that most other people didn’t give a shit. (Sound sorta familiar these days.)
Eventually I began to get interested in politics, with the 2008 election coming up, and my getting older and interest in religion got me thinking about issues other than cars or computers. Politics, being a dynamic thing, really was much more complicated to dissect than religion. I, and others I am sure can attest, had taken a relatively hard stance against Obama, and began my road down Libertarianism. I thought the market was the cure, the government was the problem. I had probably turned that into an almost black and white distinction – a viewpoint engineered into the political arena if you change the red and blue colors around. The truth is, they are not as different as they claim, but the only things they talk about (they being politicians, modern day priests, aka bullshit artists) are things which are obvious, or they have a bullshit solution that includes spending your money, going to war, or kicking the can down the road.
The things they can’t fix, or understand, or aren’t in their interests are the things that make all politicians shit for brain assholes, or greedy sociopaths, your choice. These things are not discussed, because, like the shitty movies Hollywood puts out these days, everything has to have a happy ending.
The happy ending is the carrot on the stick. You are the donkey chasing that carrot.
A priest isn’t going to have a sermon about sexually assaulting children, and a politician isn’t going to talk about trillions in debt with no foreseeable way of paying for it. That is political suicide.
What makes you happy makes you vote, and work, and buy shit. That false sense of security you are lulled into right now is precisely what this looney bin needs to keep the wheels turning. Without the opiate of the masses, TV, or empty promises to make up for today’s setbacks, and most certainly without the complete lack of attention span in this country that lets you be fooled by the same magic tricks – we wouldn’t be such an apathetic, comatose, oblivious society we are today.
Once you get past the empty promises of your priests to be delivered in the afterlife, and the empty promises of politicians to win votes and be forgotten, then it’s not so hard to see through bullshit peddled on the news that omits or distorts the truth. Usually omits. You start to get curious, something which neither priests nor politicians desire, and those promises become lies.
But don’t take it personally. That’s the outcome of the world we live in. A world saturated in bullshit, distractions, gluttony, and immaturity. Everywhere you look you can find evidence of popular misconceptions. Like any good pyramid scheme, like our economy, you buy and sell the bullshit. I would be willing to say most of my generation is interested more in what is popular, than what is true. Popular culture is what the news is based on. Sports, celebrities, bullshit. It is what most others surround themselves with, bullshit.
People’s energy is usually put into doing something for another’s profit, or attempt at it in my case, and then anything outside of work is “leisure time” spent doing nothing of importance, thus the boredom most experience, leading to the use of several distraction methods to allay said boredom.
People are more concerned about boredom and reality TV than extinction and physical reality. They are totally disconnected from nature, the real world, and the whole rest of the ecosystem as well as themselves. People have no real identity. I can scratch the surface of society, of the “American Dream” and America today and find nothing but rotten apples. I can also scratch the surface of most people I see on a daily basis, and see that brain that took 13 billion years to get here is devoid of relevance. They, as the press calls them, are nothing but consumers. Either of food, obviously, or of advertising, distractions, or bullshit.
I think, somewhere deep, deep down, people know this about themselves. Because they try to cover it up. Fat chicks wear tight clothes playing pretend, apparently. Old ladies dress like hookers in Colleyville. I see Maybachs and Aston Martins parked at Church, who worships a guy that said the meek will inherit the Earth, and the love of money is the root of all evil. I see people so ignorant, they are ignorant to their own hypocrisy. I know a lot of dumbasses, or knew, in college acting smart because they were physically in a classroom but mentally in a playpen – where they have been, mentally, their entire lives. Even the “smart” ones that would agree with me, but think their consumer choice of different light bulbs and a Prius will afford them all the other bullshit are wrong. Technology cannot replace the immense energy we use, it is only a product of it.
People in this land of 300,000,000 live and breathe skin deep. They know nothing, or care about nothing, past the surface. It’s easier that way, I guess. Less mental effort, less mental stress. But, in reality, that only makes the time bomb bigger. Eventually, we as a society, as a world, as humans, will have to face the consequences for the way we’ve been living. That, or our future generations will. But if any of you were curious enough, you’d probably bet on the latter.
