Quotes

A symbolic expression of this disaster is that when Hewlett wrote her book a year ago, 146 countries had ratified the international convention on the rights of the child, but one had not: the U.S. That’s a standard pattern for international conventions on human rights. However, just for fairness, it’s only proper to add that Reaganite conservatism is catholic in its anti-child, anti-family spirit, so the World Health Organization voted to condemn the Nestle Corporation for aggressive marketing of infant formula, which kills plenty of children. The vote was 118 to 1. I’ll leave you to guess the one. However, this is quite minor compared with what the World Health Organization calls the “silent genocide” that’s killing millions of children every year as a result of the freemarket policies for the poor and the refusal of the rich to give any aid. Again, the U.S. has one of the worst and most miserly records among the rich societies.

Another symbolic expression of this disaster is a new line of greeting cards by the Hallmark Corporation. One of them says, “Have a super day at school.” That one, they tell you, is to be put under a box of cereal in the morning, so that when the children go off to school it says, Have a super day at school. Another one says, “I wish I had more time to tuck you in.” That’s one that you stick under the pillow at night when the kid goes to sleep alone. [laughter] There are other such examples.

In part this disaster for children and families is the result simply of falling wages. State corporate policy has been designed for the last years, especially under the Reaganites and Thatcher, to enrich small sectors and to impoverish the majority, and it succeeded. It’s had exactly the intended effect. That means that people have to work much longer hours to survive. For much of the population both parents have to work maybe fifty to sixty hours merely to provide necessities. Meanwhile, incidentally, corporate profits are zooming. Fortune magazine talks about the “dazzling” profits reaching new heights for the Fortune 500 even though sales are stagnating.

The process of creating and entrenching highly selective, reshaped or completely fabricated memories of the past is what we call “indoctrination” or “propaganda” when it is conducted by oficial enemies, and “education,” “moral instruction” or “character building,” when we do it ourselves. It is a valuable mechanism of control, since it selectively blocks any understanding of what is happening in the world.
One crucial goal of successful education is to deflect attention elsewhere —say, to Vietnam, or Central America, or the Middle East, where our problems allegedly lie—and away from our own institutions and their systematic functioning and behavior, the real source of a great deal of the violence and suffering in the world. It is crucially important to prevent understanding and to divert attention from the sources of our own conduct, so that elite groups can act without popular constraints to achieve their goals—which are called “the national interest” in
academic theology.

Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the ‘normal people’ as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like ‘Have a nice day’ and ‘Weather’s awful today, eh?’, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like ‘Tell me something that makes you cry’ or ‘What do you think deja vu is for?’

‘More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can’t be trusted.

A person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.

The consciousness-force in us that appears as the root of will and perception can be called Kia. This Kia has no form. Any form of innate divinely sanctioned motive that one may seem to have found in it is illusion. It is this void at the center of one’s being which is the real Holy Guardian Angel. The psychic censor, on the other hand, is a material thing which protects the mind from magic and from being overwhelmed by the awesome strangeness of the psychic dimension which appears to us as chaos.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that lie ahead.