I’ve been away from blogging for some months, partly due to life’s business and partly due to having an archetypal tower moment in which I question everything, not least of which is my function as a writer.
Plus, you know how it is when, as an artist or entrepreneur, you have several pots on the stove that could represent real progress. At the moment, though, it’s looks from the outside like a chaotic moment in the kitchen where Chef Gordon Ramsey is cursing you out for your culinary idiocy.
More on all this later.
And now onto the conspiracy theorist thing.
I got red-pilled, as they say, a few years back. I mean, how could I not? Keanu Reeves is such a beautiful man. If he picks the red pill, I’m gonna pick it too.
Alright, banishing Mr. Reeves from my mind to return to my subject.
Being red-pilled is like in that John Carpenter movie, “They Live,” where special sunglasses allow our protagonists to see through the propaganda of an alien death cult, bent on human domination.
Once you start questioning enough things, you go into a spiral where you fall so far down the rabbit hole, you’re not sure you’re gonna get out. The basic idea is, as I put it to myself, “Wake up, m’ija. There are people in powerful places who don’t have our best interests at heart.”
But they say the right things and make the right faces. Some people are convinced. Others, like me, see them as voicing messages like “Consume” or “Obey.”
I don’t want to say that I rebel against and question everything. I’ve let myself be patted down before concerts. I may have even enjoyed it.
However, here’s a wariness, a vigilance, that has become part of my character. There’s a 50/50 chance I’m mad and a 50/50 chance that I’m an anti-hero in the making.
There is a news announcement that on October 4, when our children are in school and we’re all knee-deep in our daily routine, that there will be a nationwide broadcasting system test in which every possible device will sound loudly.
And I’m sorry, that mama-bear, Alaskan snowmobiling part of me– or perhaps more importantly that George Orwell part of me–says something about this stinks. It strikes me as a planned mass trauma event.
Kids, including those with autism and high sensitivity, are going to be subjected to a universal loud noise. They’re already going out of their comfort zone into an uncertain world.
Will this scare any kids or hurt their ears? It’s a warning, and kids are always wary of emergencies, rightly so, even simulations of emergencies like fire drills or active shooter drills.
Will this on some visceral level freak out grownups too? And if it’s the start of something that’s used often, won’t that be the equivalent of living amid air raid alarms? Are we involved a war and just not admitting it?
So, that’s my initial feeling about October 4. I don’t know if I want my kids out in the world when this experiment starts. I think you can protect people without freaking them out.
Maybe I’m too emotional when viewing such things, always looking out for the vulnerable. Maybe I’m just like my mother, she’s never satisfied. Oh wait, that’s a line by Prince.
What are your thoughts on this situation–specifically a very loud–potentially uncomfortably loud–sound emanating from everyone’s cell phones and TV?.
I’ll admit it. There’s also a bit of self-interest here. I’m what you call high strung. My ears hurt when movies are played too loud. I have to cover my ears when someone drives by thumping their bass too hard or when people drive by on Harley’s. No offense to you, my cyclist friends, but your bike’s sound makes me feel like someone is playing on my nervous system like its a one-string guitar, and as though a vice were compressing my skull until it squeezes my brain.
It might just be enough to have one device in the houses turned on. A single warning, rather than a Cassandra-like chorus of warnings, might just suffice. We’ll see how I shall proceed, given this even occurs.
So, allow me to come out as a conspiracy theorist, retaking the term lovingly–and say that frightening collective events, whether planned or accidental, seem to add crippling psychological damage to every generation.
In no particular order, I give you:
The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, while screened live in children’s classrooms across the United States (1986).
9/11
The ‘Duck and Cover’ song and series of films shown to the Baby Boomers as the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States escalates.
The children were made to understand that an atomic bomb might be dropped at any moment on the United States. Further, , given the lack of warning, their best bet for protection wasto clamber under desks that can hardly fit their frame and hold their hands over their neck. This is the stuff of nightmares.
My own school-age nightmare, born in the ’70s and growing up in the ’80 and early 90’s, was constant education about child predators hoping to rape and murder children. My curriculum of films included one that showed the bare legs of a girl protruding in a kitchen as police investigate a homicide. Apparently, the poor naive kid agreed to an on-the-spot babysitting gig for a stranger who, unfortunately, had no kids but only ill-intent.
The media focus on the proliferation of people wanting to personally target us was backed up by a number of real-life events or rumors, both of which feel interchangeable to a child.
I was 12 when the Night Stalker roamed the streets of the Los Angeles, often using the 10 Freeway to traverse to cities in the East San Gabriel Valley (my stomping grounds) and kill, violate and mutilate anyone he could get a hand on.
I’ll admit I felt especially vulnerable to attack because I had a lot of fears in general, likely an early sign of OCD, and because of the credence I put in rumor.
You see, my parents hid the newspaper and turned off the news when we were around, because they didn’t ant my sister and I, 12 and 14, to hear about all the gory details.
Given a lack of real details, kids piece together a story. Who knows, maybe the story I was hearing was right. The most likely victim, they said, was a person near a freeway exit (me), living in a yellow house (me) with their rooms at the front of the house, facing the street (me). I was obviously doomed.
In the meantime, while parents tried to minimize the terror of the situation, and their own fear, their behavior belied the casual attitude. For instance, when my relatives gathered the adults had hushed conversations about the Night Stalker and the kids traded speculations and stories of close encounters.
Every kid seemed to know some kid whose cousin’s family was murdered. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism, a catharsis. Or else just kids bullshitting.
In the meantime, and this was the mid-80s, many of my cohorts–suburban dwellers ranging from living below the poverty line to clinging to lower middle class status–learned something.
Our dads, usually so peaceful-seeming, brought out their guns. They kept them loaded and under their bed, breaking what is usually a cardinal rule in keeping kids safe from firearms.
These dads had bigger fish to fry. They wanted to protect themselves, their wives and their family from a looming and senseless violence.
This circumstance helped determine my status as someone who has no party and will always have to go issue by issue. Yes, any gun violence is horrific. But I was a smart kid and I learned something that stuck with me for life.
Men, and yes, some women–particularly single mothers–have a deep-seated need to defend themselves and their family, or at least try, against senseless harm.
It made me not be able to be someone who aims for complete gun control, and this is not because I use them or love them myself.
I am a real-life teddy bear who struggles against a category of obsessive and compulsive disorder in with the poor sap thus afflicted fears they will harm themselves or others. This is despite a track record of peaceful behavior and a deep-seated terror of causing harm.
But I’ve veered off too far into my own circumstance and into the very beginnings of adolescence, plagued by the idea that kids weren’t safe. There were boogeymen out for blood.
We have, of course, children of World War I and II being awakened by the sounds of air raid sirens and gunfire.
We have those poor beleaguered boomers again watching as their televisions showed them the assassination of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcom X and, not too long after, the killing of John Lennon.
So here I am, looking gorgeous as always. As Don Henley in his solo hit “Boys of Summer” sings of me, “You’ve got your hair pulled back.. Sunglasses on.”
Of course, though, they’re those messed-up apocalyptic glasses that prompt me to see lies, propaganda and ignorance all around, furthered by the legacy media at the behest of politicians.
And now for a dialogue, with my loyal readers. Are you a conspiracy theorist? What do you think of people whose first impulse when it comes to politicians is distrust.
Are we, the tinfoil-hat crowd, a healthy part of society? Maybe the world needs our unique combination of skepticism–a vaccine that fools with our MRNA? Why does that strike me as a dicey proposition?–and willingness to lend an ear to the improbable.
Finally, what are your thoughts of this allegedly-scheduled national altert event? Let me know if you think it’s business as usual–the sign of a country that has it’s shi*& together–or potentially a mass trauma event.
Yours, controversially, Sarah Torribio
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