Telling ourselves the truth.

[felix_numinous]

The stories we tell ourselves and each other make up our worlds. What stories do we tell ourselves? What language do we use to describe the world? Not everyone chooses to nor can handle the harshest truths, as any hospital worker, police, fire and rescue worker knows. Soldiers know this best. I have heard people coming home from war saying to come home to America was like coming home to Disneyland.

We parse words in order that we sleep at night, refer to death as passing, injured or lost, to smooth over the harshest details. How is this different from the phrase collateral damage to make the killing of civilians more palatable, so we move on to the next sentence, turn the page and start the next story or sound bite.

Yesterday I was admonished for using the word genocide. It is not the first time, years ago when the killing of brown people was in full swing again I used this word but was hushed up real fast. Not everyone can use these words, not everyone can face the absolute harshest truths--but until we tell ourselves the truth and look in the darkest mirror at this Nation's shadow, we WILL be controlled by it. We are literally being run by a shadow government. Why? Their power lies in the fact that most people like to live in a fantasy world and distract themselves from that huge prison just down the street that is torturing young people, right down the street. Do you know where your neighborhood veteran's hospital is? It is full of things you would remember for the rest of your life. Most people have not been to a slaughterhouse either. Real photos of the war do not make it into the country, how many journalists have been killed for just this. The harsh truth is that powerful.

What ended the Vietnam war was just a couple of little pictures. One of a little girl running from a napalm attack and another of a man at the moment of his execution. That shocked this Nation. Now Keith Olbermann is taken off the air, history is being rewritten in schools across the country, trying to erase the past in order to repeat it. What makes Keith and all those like him a drink of fresh water is the accuracy of his words. Accurate words are nutrients for our minds, and the pseudo labeling of reality is a powerful narcotic.

I used the word genocide because it has occurred all through history on every continent. Not just in Germany. What do you call the killing of indigenous tribes, and the systematic supplying of poor neighborhoods with dangerous drugs, guns and then incarceration and torture of them? What do you call the negligence of allowing New Orleans to die twice? The targeting of certain groups of individuals in our society, gay, hispanic, black, and the poor is being tolerated, enabled and allowed by a minority of rich white families. This has been going on for generations, but today it is effectively disguised as religious or political. That is just the dressing on the real thing, the harsh truth. References to Nazis are not only out of respect for those dead but all the others--'Never forget' is not just about the Jewish holocaust. It is to not forget what human beings ARE capable of doing, ARE doing as we speak.

Why are our video stores FULL of horror movies? Why is it that so many people can look at plastic blood and not stomach the real thing? It is ironic indeed, and interesting that most people who have seen the real thing, real horror, the smells the screams do not mistake it for entertainment anymore. They think that by saturating people's minds with fake blood and fake horror that if the real thing slips through it will not have any effect. We have been desensitized with fiction, saturated with it so we do not seek out the truth.

We all know how to end these wars, to saturate the airwaves, the streets with clear full color photos and detailed stories of what is going on, to not let up with the sickening harsh truth of it all, to bring the real horror to the doorsteps of those who are too comfortable in their plastic virtual realities. Disrupt Disneyland, and we can do it peacefully. Ecocide. Genocide. Words have power, both by their use and their omission. The pen is more powerful than the sword.

I now am making decisions who to tell about going through cancer, some people cannot handle this truth and others I can talk to in great detail. It is my good friends who can talk and joke about everything--I love that--to be able to talk about anything. I understand the urge to want to live in Disneyland, to parse words and pretend that horrific wars are not going on as we speak, people are not being tortured, and some family is not losing the roof over their head-but I know that to fully enjoy a good time I have to have one foot firmly in the real world. In order to appreciate this gift of life it is necessary to acknowledge the agony and the ecstasy of this world.