Traversing the Land of Fanatics, Part II
Traversing the Land of Fanatics, Part II
"If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X
This is the 2nd in my series of “Inspirational Essays,” which I will now be publishing once a month. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to join this community of thoughtful readers and listeners. Everyone can read the first part of this essay.
You can listen to me reading this essay HERE
Without a doubt, the most inspirational change that has happened to me since the lie of COVID took over our lives has been my ever-strengthening commitment to uncover the truth. The people reading this who agree with my words will keep on reading. Those who take offense to “uncover the truth,” knowing it means that I doubt the state-sanctioned “experts,” will stop reading. They will immediately label me with two other words that have now become part of everyday vocabulary: “conspiracy theorist.”
Deriding people as “conspiracy theorists” because they disagree with the “experts” and get their information from “fake news” is a “triggered” response to anything the MSM labels “disinformation.” This has got to be one of the most successful indoctrination campaigns of our government, controlled as they are by the “New World Order” (oops, more triggering words that turn off the brains of millions).
What happened to all of the doubters? They are being silenced as surely as Malcolm X and so many others have been silenced.
I have been told many times I am a Doubting Thomas. I take it as a compliment.
It caused me a lot of trouble growing up. I asked far too many questions. Even at the age of 5, lying in bed at night I pondered why the world was such a terrible place. Why did so many children suffer and die horrible deaths? They didn’t deserve it. I learned about all those suffering children in Sunday school. Why was I so lucky and millions of other children were not? It didn’t seem fair.
It was okay to ask questions as long as I reached the right conclusions. By the age of seven, the age of reason, I should be filled with conviction, say the sinner’s prayer, and accept Jesus into my heart. Only then would I be saved. Anyone not following this pattern was going to hell. I struggled with this dogma well into my adult years. Just because I had been told it was true, how did I know? Lots of people believed differently.
During our family’s world travels, I had met many people of different faiths. Some of those encounters left lasting impressions on me, such as conversations with the mysterious professor in Fes, Morocco that I share in The Bloodsuckers and my encounter with the Nubian sailor in Luxor, Egypt, shared in Why I Stand with Israel. The world was a big place, filled with all sorts of amazing people. How did I know they weren’t right? I didn’t want to believe something just because I’d been raised in a certain way. How was it free will if I was told I had to do it or I was going to hell? I only found out years later those other religions put the same pressure on their followers. Even worse. When I returned to live in Luxor as an adult, I experienced first-hand some of those horrors, recounted in my recently published Egyptian Streets article, Tales of Eclipse: The Lost (Foreign) Women of Luxor.
How can any of us ever be sure we are really making up our own minds and not being brainwashed, intentionally or not, by childhood or media indoctrination?
Why I Stand with Israel was published on May 14, 2021, at the height of the Israeli—Palestinian crisis. At that time, I was just starting out on Substack and had very few subscribers. I knew it would be a controversial essay that might lose me subscribers. But the topic was important to me and “The Squad” was making such outrageous statements, I wanted it to be clear from the beginning of my writing journey where I stood on the matter.
Sure enough, there were those who did take offense. Not least of all, one of my liberal Jewish friends who emailed me that she was unsubscribing because of my support of Israel. I wasn’t surprised. Those were the days when mass psychosis was taking hold. A person might agree with everything else I wrote but that one thing was and still is enough to end any dialogue.
Gay pride participants can hold banners extoling Pfizer, despite its history of corrupt, heinous experimentation on vulnerable populations, while at the same time support Islamic extremists who commit atrocities like throwing gay men to their deaths off the top of a tall building. This instance happened in Iraq but as anyone knows who has lived in the middle east, there is no Arab country where it is safe to be gay.
Thanks for Ariel Pink for sending me this powerful video, showing how the lies of the media have convinced the gay community that Israelis do not support them while Palestinians do and their shock when they find out the horrible truth. Israelis or Palestinians--Who's more tolerant?
This irrational mentality grew like a plague worse than any coronavirus. Like robots, the populace began responding exactly as they were programmed to do by the media, repeating the propaganda of the state and vilifying anyone who didn’t join in.
I knew of NO ONE who thought that black lives didn’t matter, even if they didn’t support BLM. I knew of NO ONE who thought that Palestinian lives didn’t matter, even though they supported Israel. Yet, anyone who dared to say this was deemed a racist. A murderer.
There is now no room for debate. No room for even one teeny tiny discussion. We live in echo chambers. Yes, I’ve said it before, but it’s important we don’t forget. We must not get used to living like this. We must not start thinking this is normal. If we do, it will actually become normal, and we will forget there was ever a time when it wasn’t so.
People believe we are winning this war because all they hear are voices validating the same words that they have been saying. This has purposely fooled us into thinking the tide is shifting in our favor when all it is doing is making people passive. Living inside technology does weird things to the brain. The manipulations are quite insidious.
Let’s not be satisfied living in this echo chamber. All the best memories of my life are from surprising and unexpected encounters with real people who perhaps thought a little or a lot differently from me. Many of these people had knowledge beyond my own and I benefited from their teachings. This has become impossible in our present state.
How many of us at the end of our lives will look back and say, wow, my best memory is from the Metaverse, when I built the biggest mansion, or won a Gold Medal in ski jumping, or overcame my fear of heights and skydived?
But you know what? Those might the biggest moments of our grandchildren’s lives.
Meta Inc has just announced the launch of a designer clothing store for digital avatars called the “Meta Avatars Store.” As adults who remember a childhood free of such madness, you may laugh. “That’s ridiculous,” you say. “No one will fall for that.”
But if you have ever spent time around the average teenager, you will know it is not a laughing matter. They are being fed a constant diet of “trans” formation, where they are being led to believe they can be anything—just not themselves.
As Meta’s Zuckerberg explains:
An avatar in the metaverse is more than just a user-created face. It is your identity. Every avatar is unique with limitless possibilities. Avatars have humanoid features such as moveable limbs, upper and lower torsos, and a face capable of expression. Similar to the real world, you can buy clothes for your avatars as well. These digital clothing are essential and can be bought and sold on a marketplace.
We’re launching our Avatars Store on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger so you can buy digital clothes to style your avatar. Digital goods will be an important way to express yourself in the metaverse and a big driver of the creative economy.
That’s just the beginning of the things our children will be programed to buy with the credits they accumulate for having a small carbon footprint and being an obedient citizen.