People are so unconnected to the real world, so much lost in
the lies and deceit that they’ve been
fed that it’s any wonder anything can get done.
You can go to college and learn all kinds of stuff, all kinds of
practical stuff, but when it comes to making decisions about the real stuff of
life, they have you in their pocket because they got you believing in imaginary
stuff from the time you were small. And
when you grow up, you have no reference for the realities of life, for the
things that they didn’t want to talk to you about because they were lazy or they
were scared or they were just plain stupid, or their parents did it to them.
They start in on you very early, while you’re still
gullible. They start lying to you when
you start asking questions they can’t answer, like “Where did I come from?”
“Oh, honey – of course, the Stork brought you.”
And this is the perfect thing to start the trail of lies
with – you’re a little dependent being, totally narcissistic, self-centered,
and the fairy tale centers on you. By
the time they’re through with you, that story is in, and they’re off the hook
with that question for a while.
And how do they do it?
They have this pictorial evidence of a cartoon stork holding, in its
long (and dangerous) beak, a sheet folded into a little baby hammock. Of course, it isn’t real evidence; it’s a cartoon and you can’t even see the baby in
most of those pictures. But you take in that
picture and you think about coming down the chimney, and of course you think that
the reason that they are so hard on you about staying clean is that the stupid
stork couldn’t just drop you through a window
onto a nice comfy chair – he (because you know
that a female stork would take better care of a baby) had to drop you down the
chimney and you probably landed in a big cloud of ash that messed up the carpet
and left you all black and sooty. So,
with the combination of the cheerful ‘retelling’ of your ‘birth’ and the
pictorial ‘evidence’ and the guilt for completely messing up their almost
sacrosanct living room, you buy it and
stop questioning, and they won’t have to deal with that question (or fix it)
for another decade, if they’re lucky.
So you’re a helpless little kid, dependent on these Big
People for everything, and you just swallowed your first Big Lie. And this is a Big Lie, not like “Daddy’s not
mad” or “You’re only at the babysitter for a half hour – Mommy will be home
soon.” This is a lie that will affect
your life for a long time – not for your whole life (probably) but for a number
of years at least.
And that’s the First Lie:
The Stork brought you, honey.
Ok, so they got you pretty good, but the hook’s not set –
not yet. So the next thing has to grab you, has to really have an effect
on you to keep you believing the stuff they are feeding you.
And what will that be?
Well, appealing to your narcissism worked the first time, and the cute
animal worked pretty well (and animals can’t betray the Big People because they
can’t talk). And what might grab
you? Your desire. Sure, even at that young age, you have very
strong wants. They dangle something you
want. So here comes the Easter
Bunny! And look, he’s got brightly
colored eggs that you can search for in a treasure
hunt. Boy, all that production value
sure makes this seem important – and fun. But what will make it even more fun? Candy!
And you’re a kid – you want
candy.
So, with your mouth full of candy
and your face covered with chocolate, you get through the admittedly low-key
holiday by means of the distraction of the hunt and the little windows in some
of the eggs, and you’ve bought the lie again.
And that’s the Second Lie:
Aren’t you excited that the Easter
Bunny is coming, sweetie?
But the Easter Bunny won’t work for
too long. And the reason is not that you
are too smart for them, but that sooner or later you are going to come face to
face with that imaginary character, and you will notice the shoddy costume, the
fake eyes, the whole artifice of it all.
Where ‘pictorial evidence’ worked for the Stork story, they need more
for the Easter Bunny tale, and pictorial evidence is thin, so they trot out
someone’s dad or a hired actor – and sooner or later, one of the kids is gonna
twig to the fact that this ain’t no real rabbit. And part of the way that they strategize
against that inevitability is by having you immediately help with the dyeing of
the Easter eggs for the hunt just as soon as you start to doubt the Bunny. And by this means, they've given their
credibility a bump – they’ve admitted to mendacity while inviting your
collusion at the same time: “Well,
wouldn’t it be fun to dye some Easter eggs?
And you can help hide them? It’s
for the little kids, after all.”
Now, let me divagate here for a
moment before tackling the Third Big Lie, because we’ve come to one of the
minor lies that feed this whole system of brainwashing kids: Hallowe’en.
Hallowe’en also works on several
levels with kids, because it involves things kids love – dressing up in
costume, wandering around at night and playing pranks, knocking on strangers’
doors, and candy. There is no great
imaginary friend in the game, but the use of various ‘characters’ from the
media and (less and less so) from literature brings a kind of surreal quality
to the event that plays right into the whole ‘imaginary friend’ program that
the Big People put on kids to brainwash them.
It goes like this: “If we can
play and have fun among a lot of people pretending to be whom they are not,
then the kids won’t have as much trouble getting comfortable with imaginary
beings in the conversation, and they will come to believe through a subtle transference. And if some of those pretenses involve beings
that clearly do not exist, then the kids will thus become indoctrinated to the
entire idea of believing in things that don’t exist.”
Candy seems to play big in these
lies our parents told us… at Easter, on Hallowe’en, and even on that
lie-riddled Valentine’s Day (named after a guy whose own end was as messy as
that garage on Clark Street in Chicago in 1929).
Candy. And the unspoken thing about
Hallowe’en is that the Big People have taught you the whole scheme of
extortion, readying you a bit more for the life you will step into as an adult,
in which you will need to learn to withhold in order to get what you want –
and whether you are withholding good things or bad things, it’s still extortion.
Hallowe’en actually serves a viable
purpose in this scheme to brainwash kids, because it presents the kind of
contradictions that their lives will be filled with: “Ok, we’re gonna go around as dead people –
no, really dead people and ghosts, vampires, werewolves and all that – and
we’re gonna knocks on doors and demand candy and people are gonna give it to us
candy.” There’s that candy again! This mixing of treats and fun and dead people
is another instance of the surreal creeping into events that the kids are
actually involved in, but the negative aspects of this juxtaposition won’t come
up til much later in life, when you’re all adults and you have to actually
confront death,
And before we get too far ahead of
ourselves on the life’s timeline, let’s get to the Third Big Lie. So about six years old – as young as five for
some kids and as old as seven for others – kids start losing their ‘baby
teeth,’ the placeholders for their actual life-long teeth while the jaw is
growing to a good size. And with the
loss of the first baby tooth, the next Big Lie makes her entrance: the Tooth Fairy.
Again, we have an imaginary
character in a little drama centered on the child – the child is the hero or
heroine of the story, and the Tooth Fairy is the benefactor who makes all the
pain and messiness of losing a tooth worth it.
The child is young enough to still believe in these things, and –
because of the tall tale’s setup – there is no worrisome bunny costume, no need
for pictorial evidence, because it all takes place while the child is asleep. the Tooth Fairy makes her ‘appearance,’ but
the only appearance that the child sees is the physical ‘evidence’ of a quarter
or a dollar or whatever hush-money that the Big People leave under the
pillow. Voila – a kid who believes! (Until the notion is shot down by some
anarchist in the schoolyard.)
So there’s the Third Lie: Don’t
cry about that hurty tooth, honey – the Tooth Fairy will leave you some blood
money!
And now we’re ready to look at the
penultimate of the Big Lies of childhood:
Santa Clause. Again, the
‘tradition’ we know is much diluted (or powerfully adulterated) from the
original. But for our purposes here, we
can view the current tradition (or that of the recent past) and find another
appeal to narcissism, paying of the desires of the kid, and candy. Christmas (and Hanukkah), as celebrated in
the secular world, introduces another aspect, one which the child is now
advanced enough to assimilate and apply to the world at large: greed.
The notion of a jolly old man who showers children with gifts is a
powerful intoxicant to a greedy little kid, and one that will be apprehended as
plausible without much examination – if only because of the effort involved in
unwrapping all the much-desired presents.
And part of the evidence, if all
the hoopla of ‘the holidays’ isn’t enough for our little believer, then the
actual and real embodiment of ‘Old Saint Nick’ in department stores is quite
enough for children of a certain age.
Once the child gets the notion that all might be a bit askew (especially
by the sight of all those bell-ringing St Nick’s in front of stores), it is a
simple thing to smudge the picture a bit and gain a perhaps a whole year of gullibility
out of the kid – Oh, he’s not the real Santa Clause; he’s one of Santa’s helpers,
dressed up to look like Santa… for the little kids, you know?
And that’s the Fourth Lie:
You better behave yourself and be
good – or Santa Clause isn’t going to bring you all those you want so much.
No wonder the shock of adolescence
is so tough on kids – all those lies of childhood, spinning in the kid’s head
doused with a cocktail of hormones and self-doubt. But the kid is now ready to accept and
believe all kinds of things, and the public schools have been feeding him a
long line for a long time – Thanksgiving and the ‘helpful’ Indians,
Washington’s cherry tree and dollar-across-the river, and al the other myths
that Americans so diligently constructed for the last two-hundred-plus years to
cover up the greed and rapacity and inhuman cruelty that could not be justified
and so had to be whitewashed.
Jarion Monroe, in one of our conversations about the subject
of childhood lies said, “I think the progression of lies actually may be
(rather than consecutive) more of an
equally weighted net to capture and pull the budding inquiring/formative
mind into the miasma of belief; something which the scientific method keeps
trying to counteract with its system of empirical proofs, which is very
dangerous to the ruling families and their nouveau hangers-on. I always
come back to the power of greed, the driving engine for the thinly-disguised
primal
fear-of-death-as-remedied-or-ameliorated-by-accumulating-everything-in-sight.” [ital mine]
This net of deceit has for generations
been brushed off as a ‘necessary evil’ when raising children… but that
‘explanation’ cannot excuse the behavior that has led to a largely ignorant and
now diversion-addicted predominant culture.
Considering how many lies their
teachers told children about America’s
ongoing pageant of skewed and hypocritical political processes, it’s not
surprising that the work of the parents colluded with those lies to form minds
that could easily accept the blatantly false as if it were true.
The ‘political conversation’ has
turned into a travesty of thought and logic, after so many people have
swallowed wholesale so many patent untruths about every aspect of our lives that
the power to discern reality from fiction has faded to a feeble feint in the direction
of sunshine as they fall back to a kind of walking sleep. We have an electorate that is largely ignorant
of its own history, of the diverse and rich cultures that gathered and
coalesced into what is called the ‘melting pot’ (but would more accurately be
called the ‘salad bowl’), of the kind of culture America has become, and of the
lies that we all have been fed and willingly consume every day of our lives.
And technology has rendered modern
life so busy (how long each day do you spend just deleting emails?) and so
expensive that who cares anymore that Washington is a snake basket full of
lying hypocrites (of both parties) and that our self-appointed ‘news’ outlets
are using nonstop ‘bad news’ to covering up the real bad news each and every
day?
Is there any hope? There would be, in a generation or two, if
only we would take the time to continue to educate ourselves, to provide more
and better education for our children, to not let the politicians cut education
spending – because we are falling far far behind ‘underdeveloped’ countries,
and we need every good mind we can muster to even begin to solve the problems
facing us in the coming years.
This little essay got pretty large,
pretty fast, so I think we’ll quit hire for a while, and we’ll take a look at the
Bi-polar Sky Wizard in the next installment, because he’s a whole couple of
books by himselves.
David Hakim is an internationally-published journalist and award-winning author who has run several newspapers – and recently received a commendation for his short story That Man in the London Aesthetica Competition. He can be reached at dhakim at earthlink.net
© 2012 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.
