smorg

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Me and Andy are over for work this week. Here are the obligatory pictures of our lodgings. Used to be an old barn, now a high fallutin brothel!!!

I mean, hotel.

I’ve just started reading the new book by Al Gore, called “The Assault on Reason”. It’s premise is basically that the way we, as humans, communicate and exchange ideas has ben so badly warped by ‘one sided’ media such as television, that as a culture we are failing ourselves.

Yes, there are some politics in the book, and it reads at times like a text book, but it’s really a fascinating book with some very good points.

Last night, I read through a part that was fascinating to me…let me recap it briefly.

Essentially (says the book), our brains, on a physical level ‘tag’ memories. Everything that happens to us is tagged by a timestamp of sorts, so that we can hear a song and remember that it came out in 1995 or see a movie and remember seeing it the summer of 1988 and that it was Fall and night time.

This leads to the premise that people who have a problem such as ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ do things differently. For them, the event (rape, abuse, shock, war, combat or some other life altering horror) is tagged, but not in the normal way. For them, these events are kept alive…instead of being tagged as the past, the memory is kept alive. They have no reference to the event being in the past, and thus they physically exhibit the same symptoms that they had when they event occurred and that feeling is triggered by a visual or some other cue.

So if, for instance, a soldier was involved in a firefight on an Iraqi street corner, and one day he is walking along and hears a back fire, his mind jumps back to find a memory and finds the battle. Since it isn’t tagged in the past, the soldier instantly feels scared and alarmed and defensive.

I found that theory to be remarkable. And as I thought about it, I realized that we, as a nation, are all suffering from PTSD. Think about it. On September 11th, 2001, we all saw one of the most horrifying things ever filmed happen live in our living rooms. We watched people die in real time.

Now, some 6 years later, everytime we see a plane flying too close to a city or hear the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘airplane’ in the same sentence, we lose our shit. We get sweaty hands, we panic a little inside. We hope nothings going to happen, but dread that it will.

The worst part is that the current administration knows this and they play on it. By being demagogues, they know they can manipulate us by using fear. If they tell us we don’t buy gas from overseas anymore because it might be tainted with explosives that detonate when it reaches a certain temperature and that this is a terrorist act, we are NOT going to buy that gas. We’ll line up and pay $15 a gallon for ‘American gas’ that is safe.

Think that’s far fetched? When was the last time you ate fresh spinach? Flying soon? I’ll bet that if someone goes into a coughing fit on the plane that you’ll be letting the stewards know that someone might have TB.

The point is that by using fear, and by constantly broadcasting this fear over the airwaves, we are being herded like sheep. Unless you are an avid news junkie or have the wherewithal to do some research on your own, all you know is what the talking heads tell you.

Again, the book is a little obtuse, but if you’re looking for some clarity, it’s certainly worth the read.