There's more to being than meets the eye. But a lot of it comes through there. It's just that blind people are real too. Helen Keller's an icon not just because she overcame insurmountable odds but because she represents what we all are, separately, alone, inside the mask and dance, that thing that's still there after the little technologies of vision and hearing are stripped away. The perceptions, the impressions of the world and otherness that come to us come through the channels of sense.
It's how we remake the world, inside our heads. That's a lot of what thought is, remaking the world inside our heads.
And memory.
There's different versions of what memory is, and as most people have heard by now, memories of the same event are different in each observer or participant. There's even a school that says what's being observed and remembered isn't there without that happening, that we make the world itself by doing those things. I'm not one of them.
I'm a firm believer in things "being" independent, whether I'm here or nobody is.
Still, those two categories, sense and memory, are identifiable, and they're relatively narrow bandwidths, as far as control goes. And control, right now, is the only real issue. It's become obvious to some, and many others are suspecting, that control of these times will mean absolute dominance later. That out of this chaos will emerge some new creature, like Darwin's finches in the Galapagos, and out of that will come everything. Part of my premise here is that a lot of people are sketchy around Darwin's finches for exactly that reason. That knowledge is simple, easily understood, widely available, potentially, but it isn't part of the common vocabulary.
Control.
All my information comes through a really narrow pipeline, even adding in the local library. Most Americans have even less bandwidth. So controlling that becomes a relatively easy task. Controlling that without leaving fingerprints on that control is a little harder. But it's being done.
Primary is the illusion that the television, meaning the device and everything it presents, is a neutral extension of our own senses of sight and hearing. Most Americans carry that illusion. They don't see the TV when it's on, they see what's on it.
That illusion makes it possible to provide clues and hints that lead to inevitable conclusions that the subjects come to on their own. That one trick is most characteristic of the kind of manipulation we're talking about. Making people think they did it, that their reactions are natural and a result of understanding what's really going on.
So making people think what's on the TV is what's really going on is important, and making them think that nobody is doing that, that the images and speeches and events are just appearing in front of them the way images appear in the "real world", is important too.
Just the opposite is what's happening. The images and events are being selected and displayed by a minority within a minority of people. A very small group of men make those decisions consciously, and around them are a somewhat larger group of people who anticipate, who understand intuitively what is and is not acceptable, and important.
The example that's driving all this writing is the fall of the twin towers. It's absolutely necessary that the events of September 11, 2001 be seen as rising out of the darkness, out of the unknown, that we, Americans, were just being on that day, not doing anything but being ourselves, and something that hated us, or that wanted to eat us, something like the ancient predators that hunted our ancestors, came roaring out of nowhere and hurt us, terrified us, and killed people we love.
We're here now because we didn't do that, didn't just react blindly, even when it was some fanged nightmare leaping out of the darkness. Instead we went back over the events that led up to that nightmare, whether we were quiet or loud, even how we smelled, where we were and what we did while it was happening. And what we were doing before it happened.
That's what we are, an adaptable creature that learns quickly from its mistakes. That's why we're so successful as a species, because we learn, well and quickly.
But the essential foundation for that learning is what's real, the totality of what really took place.
What do we rely on for that, for the events of 9/11? The television - it's what most of us turned to as soon as we heard. It's what people called each other on the phone and said - "Turn on the TV! Quick!"
The television, which in America is not capable of giving us the whole story, even if we demanded it, even if suddenly everyone involved in the production and presentation of its "news" and information wanted to give us the whole story, the ability isn't there. For those few hours it came closest to being what it falsely pretends to be the rest of the time - the eyes and ears of the public, the common senses of us all.
Now, three years later it's even more of a filtered bottleneck than it was. Tightly controlled images and bits of information that have no direct relationship to the people and events they're about, the only direct relationship they have is to the desire and purpose of the men who control them.
So we have a disconnect, a disjuncture, a break. We have the real event, we have "us", and in between a broken pipe, leaking valves, and a trickle of information that gets to us with a taste of brand names and invisible decisions, that have nothing to do with our well-being, or our childrens'.
It's the difference between predation and parasitism, between being hunted down and eaten, or kept in a cage and fattened, and then eaten. All those relationships become workable over time - the prey becomes faster, the predator too successful becomes soft, the host becomes immune, the parasite more benign, the domestic animal becomes comfortable and dependent.
There's a choice that isn't clear to most of us, and isn't available to a lot of us, and it's about freedom. Wildness is freedom; wilderness is too, in the chaos of the uncontrolled landscape, which has become exotic and a kind of tourist activity to some, controlled in the sense of existing within regulated boundaries.
The same thing is happening in America, the land of the free, the champion of liberty. Freedoms are controlled, dispensed and withheld, liberty is metered down and regulated. And the truth, the unmanipulated truth, is most threatening to that control.
Democracy has at its heart the vision of common people thinking for themselves. That talent, that very human ability, is still here.
9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum. The world didn't begin in September 2001.
It's plain that the only people who would want to hide the real cause of 9/11 from the public would be those who were themselves the cause of it.
The truth is freedom.
