Everyone who has developed a mistrust for the structures of society (media, religion, government, etc.) usually have one moment when the evidence becomes too obvious to ignore - that tipping point where you can never go back to their old way of thinking. As though you'd taken the Red Pill from the Matrix.
The groundwork for my moment was laid on 9/11/01. I was out of work (the company who my call center took calls for went bankrupt. It sucks walking onto your jobsite and being told that you could go home and never come back.) and I had taken a typing test that day to work at the Postal Service. I had heard whispers of something happening at the test site, but I was in no way prepared for what I saw.
I watched it all day long, giving updates to my then-wife (who was asleep at the time and couldn't process what was happening). I was already slightly awake from my own research online, so I watched the coverage with a more critical (cynical) eye. I won't go into detail nor will I interject my own opinions, because, believe it or not, that's not what sunk my opinion about the government and the media.
That came a bit later, after Colin Powell's speech to the UN to make the case for the War in Iraq. During that speech, Powell made reference to a dossier that was advertised as the latest and greatest intelligence on Iraq's nuclear capability, and that was a huge part of his push to justify invading Iraq.
Not long after, one of the sites I frequented at the time (basically amalgamations of news links interjected with commentary) linked a story from I believe the Times of India. In it, a professor from UC Berkeley revealed that a lot of the so-called "intelligence" from the dossier was actually taken from one of his student's term papers - copied word-for-word, complete with spelling and grammatical errors - that was written before the FIRST Gulf War. As in from the early 1990's.
I just kept refreshing the page, and watched the story spread all throughout Asia, then Eurpoe, slowly but surely. Eventually, it made its way to the BBC, and finally onto USA Today's website. And the instant - literally the exact moment - that the story hit American sites, the Jose Padilla story broke. DHS declared an Orange Alert. John Fucking Ashcroft interrupted his trip to Russia to make a speech light on facts and heavy on fear about the "dirty bomber".
The timing was too coincidental to be coincidental. (Not that I believe in coincidences, anyway) That was it for me. There was no going back.
And no, the change in administration did nothing to change my mind. Frankly, I'm not surprised nobody's taking Obama to task over the drone strikes. Not even his "enemies" on the "Right" will call him out on it (But 6 people get killed in a firefight at an embassy, and heads will roll).
Fuck leaving this country. Can someone please build a dimensional portal so I can go somewhere less insane? Like Wackyland? Ot Nichijou?
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
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