High School
I graduated from high school in 1974. It was after the “hippie era” —though many of us had older brothers and sisters who claimed that time. We were the “next generation” – a stop between dropping acid and drinking Mad Dog or whatever else was available – the “Dazed and Confused” era of the later 70’s.
And while we may have been soberer than those before and after us, we had our own set of issues. Ours was an era of “finding” a place in life. Some of our friends and classmates became “Children of God”; some would be “Moonies” and some “Hare Krishna”. They gave up everything to their chosen “cult” – their names and credit cards, families and nonbelieving friends.
They were taught to believe and obey. Prayer and work crowded out independent thought. Continual chanting “Hare Krishna – Hare Krishna, Krishna – Krishna, Hare – Hare,” drowned out any attempts to analyze their situation. I diet of little more than boiled rice kept them from having the energy to think. Outside influence – family, friends, Media, was strictly regulated. They could talk to their parents: but only under supervision and generally in attempts to get more money for their “new family”. When they went into public, often to sell their “herbal incense”; more seasoned and trustworthy elder members closely supervised them.
Programming
We learned vocabulary words taken from the new mainframe computers carefully fed with stacks of punch cards. Our friends were “programmed” by the cults. Their minds were cleared by lack of sleep, intense work, limited nutrition and constant chanting. Then they were “programmed” with the faith and regulations of their newfound religion.
And there were the “deprogrammers”: guns for hire that would kidnap your child from the cult. The cult member was held in a room against their will for days. The “deprogrammer” would lecture, argue, quote scripture, and after days “break through” the cult’s mental barriers. For some of us reuniting with our lost friends it seemed more like “re-programming” with middle class American Christian mores replacing rather than returning them to their pre-cult state.
Flash forwards forty-six years to 2020. The mainframe computers are piles of hazardous waste, and kids think punch cards are something used to score a Mixed Martial Arts contest. Like those old dialup modems that cradled the landline phones, the cults of old are mostly gone.
But the concept of programming the mind is sharper than ever. Now instead of a cult member at the bus station offering “family”, the recruiter is on your pocket computer screen. It’s a YouTube video, or a celebrity text: all saying to ignore the “mainstream” media. Like the Krishna “gurus” of old this electronic programming demands loyalty and exclusivity. Any message questioning their conclusions from “outside the box” of the phone is “wrong” simply because of its origin. The “mainstream media” is declared totally corrupted, so none of their “facts” can be real.
From the Box
But the “programmees” are no longer high school kids. They are twenty and thirty something’s, Generation Y. And why not, they are the video game generation grown to adulthood that worked together to kill Nazi Zombies and win Call of Duty. They saw hope in Obama’s “Yes We Can,” but saw those ideals smothered by “the old white guys”. Bernie offered an alternative despite being an old white guy himself, but when the establishment went with Hillary – their anti-establishmentarianism turned them to Trump (and I got to use that term in a real sentence!).
Trump was the master of the Twitter message. An entire mythology was built around him, from QAnon to Alex Jones. If you throw out the entire Mainstream Media, Fox News included, what remains is only the extreme, all knowing and all inclusive. They have a universal answer to all of the questions, from class inequality to UFO’s. Science is an enemy, corrupted by industry. The guy on YouTube knows more than Dr. Fauci, and the anti-vaxxers lend respectability and even heroism to dodging a needle in the arm. The failures become the omnipotent victims, from Michael Flynn to Scott Atlas. They must be right, but silenced by the establishment. It’s George Soros striking once again.
And perhaps even worse, there is a universal equity in blame. Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden, John Roberts and Ruth Bader Ginsburg: all are establishment and therefore all are rejected equally. Republican and Democratic Parties both deny the “revolution”, so both are unacceptable. If it was on Netflix, or YouTube or anything on the “box” in their pocket, then it must be true. Anywhere else merits the universal denial – “fake news”.
Breaking the Box
How to “break the box”? We can’t kidnap Generation Y and lock them in a room to “deprogram” them. We can’t convince them that what sounds like the “universal key” to all problems is like almost all singular answers to complex problems – wrong. They are convinced: that all of the the vaccines, electoral counts, lower Courts, Republican election administrators, and now the Supreme Court itself are all corrupted – the universal answer.
Reality is there is some corruption in our government, and even in our elections. The universal opposite isn’t any more valid. And we must find a way to reach out from inside the box. Maybe “Trump World” needs to be a Podcast, not an old-fashioned essay. But that is the way out, after all of the craziness of “Stop the Steal” and “Natural Herd Immunity” fades. The box is unbreakable from the outside, but from within, it can be breeched. And that’s the way we bring America back to a place where we can work together again.
