"That is when it hit me like a bolt out of the blue. She is right - many people are tuning out today. Why? They have been programmed to do so during the past eight years under Obama."
Got ya! Okay, this was a bit of false advertising for today's thought. Besides, the Bird does have SOME standards of decency! This article is going to be about something different. It will be about something I have been thinking about quite a bit as of late. And yes, it does have to do with a blue pill - only this is the pill as described in the Matrix trilogy.
One of my social media friends went on a mini-rant the other day. She was flabbergasted that more people did not get engaged in being informed about the highly volatile issues we are having today. Some people are just tuning out. That is when it hit me like a bolt out of the blue. She is right - many people are tuning out today. Why? They have been programmed to do so. This is the hangover from the eight years of the Obama Administration.
Someone asked me a few years ago, about mid-term through the Obama term, how I thought he (Obama) could always be so disconnected. I thought for a minute and then replied. Obama saw the world as he wanted to look - not how it actually was. And that is what the Wachowski's wanted to get across when they wrote the Matrix trilogy. Taking the blue pill allowed one to escape seeing what was really happening in the world. Obama took the blue pill for eight years.
Today, we do not have a "blue pill" President. On the contrary, we have a very "red pill" President. And that has caused many of our young people who have been programmed by Obama to one of two things: 1) check out and not be a part in helping to fix things, or 2) become a snowflake, wear a p***y hat, and look for a "safe zone" to hide.
I will say once again what I have told my kids many times. Checking out is a dis-service to you and as well as your country. People my age are "past tense". We have had our run. Many of us are retired now. Our grand kids are the future. They will be the inheritors of what our kids leave them. To use baseball terminology, the grand kids are in the on-deck circle. Our kids are now up to bat. If our kids choose to "check out" at the plate, they will not do very well for the team.
My social media friend was right to be frustrated. We do all of us, need to be informed and involved today. As most of us know, the world is a mess and getting messier every week. Is it tough to watch what is going on after taking the red pill? Absolutely. But this country has been through some very tough times in the past. And we got through it by staying awake and aware. If we had taken the blue pill during World War II, our country would not be around right now.
The little blue pill. I hate what it has done to this country. I hate that it has put some of us into a zombie like state with our knowledge of current affairs. The irony of course for those who saw the Matrix trilogy is this - talking the blue pill still kept you imprisoned.
I guess the bottom line is this. If chance does favor the prepared mind, our minds need a lot more preparing - and soon. The world will not wait for us.
“Conservatism is more tolerant than liberalism.” Why? “Because conservatives don’t expect that liberalism is going to disappear; whereas liberals expect that conservatism will disappear.” Progressives are so certain of their moral righteousness and of the unassailability of their intellectual postures that they feel supremely comfortable resorting to force to stamp out or suppress those who think differently from them. They do not feel compelled to articulate their worldview, and anyone who even just dares to question its premises is instantly branded a bigot and cast out of polite society. Theirs is simply the smug position that progress is inevitable, interspersed with nonsensical don’t-you-know-that-the-arc-of-History-bends-toward-justice-and-that-you’re-on-the-wrong-side-of-said-History-if-you-disagree-with-us-type platitudes. Those who see the world with different eyes are retrograde and backward. Shaking them up—even physically, if necessary—is viewed as a public service and a personal kindness. Better beaten and bloodied than to think cops are actually essential to a well-ordered and free society!
ReplyDeleteDeep down, they are convinced that if they just deny conservatives enough intellectual, moral, and social “oxygen”—that is, places to speak and disseminate their ideas—we will just disappear. Conservatives might have pity on them and their almost child-like naïveté, except they want to bash our heads in with rocks and light businesses on fire—visiting anarchy and dissolution upon our beloved Western civilization.
They fail to see or to comprehend what I believe is the most important pro-free speech argument: That, by continuously availing oneself of the marketplace of ideas, one learns to think for oneself and to be one’s own person—not merely the puppet of those with great wealth, authority, or influence. As William F. Buckley pithily noted: “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” It is simply impossible to become a responsible and upright citizen if one categorically rejects the expression of any views that do not perfectly align with one’s own or deludes oneself into thinking that the pluralistic, wider world is an intellectual and moral monoculture in just the same way as one’s campus is.
Fascists are not people who have been duped into committing horrible atrocities; they are, instead, people who obstinately refuse to grow up and for that reason insist—with brutal violence if need be—that the world parrot back to them their own narrow prejudices and idiotic ideas.