believing where we should be seeing

I was dreaming about belief, about how much trouble that causes. So many think religious belief is the problem -- completely overlooking the beliefs they form from the steady drip, drip, drip of misinformation, mistranslation, misdirection being spewed by the media... and the beliefs they form based on the absence of things in the media. This is where the learned, in their ivory towers or out here flailing about with the rest of us, err as well. They stop being able to parse things on the basis of what is sound and what is insubstantial because, even when they are obsessively careful, too much is put about as fact when there are pixels or scrawls of any provenance to cite in support of it. The administration’s trick of leaking “information” to the press and citing the press accounts from those leaks as the basis for action they want to take is only the intentional use of the biggest threat to lucidity of the information age.

You see, everything depends on the actors’ good faith. Once one’s honor stops being more important than one’s position, one ceases to be a good faith actor. Everyone in our entire government, and everyone of any stature in our media, has ceased being a good faith actor, and we don’t have any ground upon which to stand anymore because of it.

The use of disinformation about President Ahmadinejad is a particularly nasty case in point. Everywhere in our society people believe he’s a holocaust denier who wants Israel wiped off the map. In fact, he has recognized that the holocaust is the sole underpinning for Israel continually getting away with heinous crimes -- much like 9/11 is ours -- and wishes to examine this phenomenon in public to help remove the hyperbole from the issue. He is not denying it; he wants to know what about it holds us hostage sixty years, these aching decades of misery and murder in the name of German ovens, hence. He was quoting someone else when he spoke of Israel being erased from the map of time, pointing out all the hard geopolitical realities that have just evaporated over the centuries already, as a means of placing the ongoing devastation in Palestine in a larger context. In short, neither statement was made as reported; neither of the two most civilization-damaging memes wedged in the Western consciousness about him are true. Many, many, many people are silenced from bucking the drive to nuke Iran because of these two despicable lies wedged in our brains, our belief-system-addled doorstops that run our lives and our actions. So how many of us can even tell when we’re acting in good faith anymore?

A few actually can tell that Amadinejad is innocent of those charges, yet they doggedly flog him for his government’s treatment of homosexuals, women and criminals... as if these will excuse our horrific attitudes even if the popular lies are popular lies... as if he has even the first part of the power within Iran to do Thing One about them. So nuking Iran is upheld as a not-out-of-the-question option even by those who ought to be able to see through the popular lies. Do you grok this? Zealots whose fanatic fundamentalism dwarfs bin Laden’s have made it socially unacceptable to stand up for truth in the United States of America, in the Western World. And this has completely escaped the confines of religious zealotry. It’s wedged in the hearts and minds of people who have never even cracked open a religious text, never seen the inside of a church, spend their days in utterly pristine secular debauch. It is accepted by the masses in North America, Europe and Australia.

They believe. Their faith in stuff so subliminal, so recondite, that they don’t even know they have faith in it has put them on the side of nuking Iran being on the table. They can goddam run for president on it, too, outright psychotic as that is.

In fact, I wonder if it is not completely that the comfort of belief is so strong that most humans grope for it even in the absence of anything whatever to believe in. We do miss it when we don’t have it. How many times have you yearned for someone you can believe in? A friend and I have this little game of hoping for the greater sense to prevail, having to shift our faith from one group to the next as events disappoint. First the Supremes failed us in 2000. Then the media and a bunch of law enforcement agencies began disappointing us left and right, beginning in 2001. Then the Democratic Party in 2006. We’re hoping for our military to mutiny now, since the entire government, along with all its agencies, and every media outlet, has broken faith with us. That’s the absolute last bastion before having to rely on millions of pitchforks... and... well...

there is no time for that.

While it is true that most people believe murderous things in good faith, don't mean evil by it, mostly not even equating their beliefs with believing at all, never understanding how truly earth-melting their beliefs they don’t even know they believe really are, the earth is melting. So even our patience with our fellows is pernicious in the extreme, based on beliefs that do not, and quite more vitally: can not, apply anymore.

The bad actors, the actors in bad faith, need to evaporate from the world stage, the religious nuts have to turn their attention to saving the planet upon which the ability to believe at all has always depended. All our hatreds and loves, everything must take a back seat to reality now, or we will come to envy those we have already slaughtered. It so happens that there are masses amassing who choose to believe this near uninhabitability of earth is the answer to all their prayers, the fruition of Bible prophesy. They can be counted upon to actively impede saving our planet.

Whose responsibility is this?

It’s mine. It’s yours. Until we can’t have another thing but this we are better off dead.