letter to my mother

My mother sent me an email asking me why I think my views are so different and why I thought I have all the answers.
SO I wrote back a response that I thought I would share since I know she never comes to read any of this and since I wrote it not to her but to a generic audience. So it isn't personal in any way.
In bold are her words.

why do you suppose your views are so different than anybody else's are?

I really believe that people are living in denial, the kind of denial that an addict suffers from. I believe people are addicted to this standard of living and don’t want to give it up. As a former smoker I had countless reasons not to attempt to quit my addiction. From “oh my life is too stressful right now and I wouldn’t want to add another stress” to “well you gotta die of something.” I always had a reason because I was addicted. I think that there is a similar addiction to America consumerism and its symptoms manifest themselves in similar ways.
I always knew that smoking caused cancer, made my clothes smell, bothered other people, made me less healthy over-all, cost me tons of money and all of it went to the same corporations I railed against daily but I still smoked.

For instance everyone really knows that our country is rich enough to provide health care to every citizen. Everyone really knows that our country has plenty of money to provide for our citizens after they retire. Everyone really knows that it is morally wrong to invade other nations, drop bombs on children, and torture and “disappear” people all over world. Everyone knows that the disparity of wealth causes crime. Everyone knows that the justice system is racially biased. Everyone knows that their actions are having a devastating effect on people in the third world. Everyone knows that our elected officials are bribed. Everyone knows that our presidential candidates are provided for us by Big Business. Everyone knows that the majority of the clothes they buy are made in near sweatshop conditions, which exploit the workers terribly, but they still buy them.

When one really thinks about the effect their consumption has on people on the globe who are starving, when they see their government murdering brown people and they know they supported the invasion, when they realize that their “democracy” is really a sham and they think they can’t do anything about it, when people realize that the only way for the world to survive is to drastically cut back on their consumption they don’t like the idea at all. So they turn on the TV and watch commercials. And what do the commercials tell them?
“Buy buy buy. If you don’t buy this product you will be incomplete and unhappy. You don’t want to be unhappy do you? Just think what society will think if you don’t look this way. You deserve this product. How did you ever live without this and how can you go with out? You don’t want to be unhappy do you?”
Then they turn on the news shows and what do the news shows say, “this is the way it is. We have a thriving democracy. There is no alternative. It is fine to do these things because we have no other choice. Our system is fair. We offer the full spectrum of thought; see we have two economists talking about the fairness of our system. One is from the right and the other is right of center.”
There are really plenty of people who are far brighter and far more eloquent and far more educated who believe the things I believe. Notice though they are not allowed on the news shows. Notice how the worlds leading intellectual, by all counts, is an American but he is never on American television. Notice how the one of the world’s leading scholars on the Israel/Palestine conflict and the literature surrounding it has never been on American corporate television. I could go on. The fact that the corporate media purposely shuns these people speaks volumes. I think the corporate media doesn’t want these people to be able to talk to the general population because the general population, upon hearing some of these things for the first time, might say, “wait a second, that makes a hell of a lot of sense even though Thomas Friedmann says it isn’t true. Maybe it is Mr. Freidmann, the acceptable type of intellectual, who is wrong or misrepresenting the facts to suit his, and his bosses, ideology and paycheck.”
There must have been a reason why no cable company picked up Al Jazeera English when it was launched. Maybe it is overt racism against Arabs or maybe it is that they offer a different voice that isn’t heard, and shouldn’t, be heard. So they went to YouTube instead, more on that later.
I think a better question is why do so many people believe things that are factually incorrect? Why does 95% of the US population believe in a higher power? Why did the Germans allow the Holocaust? I don’t know.

the rest of the world is wrong but you have the answers, i don't
get it.
Honestly I feel as if I am closer to what the rest of the world thinks then the average American. For instance, how many people, do you suppose, in America would say that the US President is the greatest threat to peace on the planet, not just Bush but whomever? How many Americans see the leadership of Israel a greater threat to world peace then the Iranians? How many Americans think it is a war crime to openly threaten other nations? How many Americans think their level of consumption to be ethical? How many Americans think Israel along with their own country are the biggest obstacles to peace in the Middle East?
On these and a whole host of issues I believe that I am much closer, in opinion, with the rest of the world then Americans are.
Then the question is, is the rest of the world wrong and America right? Is Ahmenijad the next Hitler? Did he really threaten to “wipe Israel off the map?” Why is there such a difference in opinion between Americans and the rest of the world?

Answers
I never claimed to have any answers. There are people with far greater minds with plenty ideas on how this world could improve for everyone. There have been studies that show the world could really feed twice the current population if we just allocated resources properly and changed parts of our diets, just to mention one. I think, that as a regular Joe, I can help to pave the way for social improvement by talking to other average people since that is the only way people can see that other things are possible. I am not delusional enough to think I am going to change the world but I am not stupid enough to think that facts can’t change people’s minds.

i think you need to become realistic
I think this is the language of addiction I was talking about earlier. “I have to be realistic about quitting my, whatever addiction, this week because external situations make it a unattainable.”

I think it is unrealistic to think that we can continue down this path without dire consequences. Maybe the world’s leading scientists are wrong, all 2000 thousand who are in agreement, and those five scientists paid by ExxonMobil are right. Personally I’d put my money behind the ones that write in peer reviewed journals as opposed to the ones that go on cable news shows.

I think it is unrealistic to believe, with all of human history available, that the leaders of Empires are benevolent to the world. Maybe I am wrong and the intellectuals who defend the right of the Empire are correct? They all have nice houses, who knows.

In reality I believe that overall things are constantly improving and moving towards a more humane American population and leadership. The examples are endless if one wants to go back and compare. People like Kennedy make Bush seem like a harmless guy. Christ, we nuked people only 60 years ago.
People are putting up with less and less of the bullshit they are being fed. As a result the news shows offer less and less difference of opinion because they know they are slowly losing grip. People are going on-line and finding other sources of news. If they want to see the truth about what is happening in Palestine they can log on to Israeli newspaper sites, which have far fairer reporting about the conflict than any American paper would ever print (which is odd). Access to information is a huge thing for freedom and democracy and that is why Big Business is trying to shut it down and control it.

Things are getting better no matter what the Bush-haters try to tell you. We have more freedoms no matter what those paranoid Ron Paul-ites try to claim. (I always tell those idiots to find an older black man and tell him he has less rights now than he did in the past.) Corporations realize that they are losing their grip and to top it off, they are beginning to collapse under their own corruption. Latin America is slowly throwing off the oppression of America and voting in left wing leaders, even people from their own ranks. Israel realizes that public opinion in America is starting to shift so they are quickly building a wall to set up their borders in one final land grab. Things are getting better.

One last quick example, a few years ago the Federal Communication Commission voted to allow mass consolidation in the media industry. Prior there were regulations about how many radio stations one could one, regulations not allowing the TV stations to own the newspaper in town and others. As one would logically expect the media was silent during the whole lead up to the vote. They never thought it was relevant to the American population to know that their parent companies were about to be given even more control over the information we receive. Once the vote went through, and the news companies were confident, they finally reported on it. As soon as the population was made aware of this change in regulation there was a massive out pouring of anger. The Congress received over a million letters demanding they overturn these new, for lack of a better term, regulations. That is one in every 300 people writing letters which says a lot, especially if one believes in that line about for every one letter writer there are one hundred people who agree with them. People as diverse as the NRA and MoveOn.Org teamed up with each other to make Congress overturn the laws and eventually they did.
Things like that give me hope for a better future.