''Are we willing to look at the truth as we perceive it and try to identify and admit our own complicity in all these atrocities, as the American government runs around the world shooting innocent women and children in the head over reasons we KNOW are lies. I mean, we're supposed to be fighting terrorists, right, but we KNOW these terrorists are not Muslim malcontents, and that most likely they are CIA/Mossad-contracted mercenaries assigned to kill Iraqi aid workers, behead innocents and blow up churches and mosques in order to inflame the situation to kindle support from the braindead public, who then mindlessly cheer the genocidal tactics of George W. Bush and pretend not to notice that not only did America CREATE the terrorists and start the war with phony evidence, we now continue the war as viciously as we can, continually murdering innocents and turning our own troops into raging psychopaths. Why? Increased profits for the military contractors, of course, which means increased under-the-table payments for our elected officials.
In a way, the easiest way to deal with that guilt is to pretend it's not really happening, which is what most Americans are doing right now.
we both know that WE are partly responsible - not matter how small or unwilling a part - for the American mass murder in Iraq, because we know we are American citizens and as such have a responsibility for controlling what our government does, at least if we are to believe and endorse the fact that America is a participatory democracy in which the people are ultimately responsible for what their government does.
Of course on another level, we have absolutely no control over what our government does. The Congress and most elected officials throughout America are bought off by the financial powers-that-be, and they do what they want, ordinary people like you and me be damned. But again, if we have integrity, we can trace a small shard of responsibility back to ourselves, to some small event in our histories in which we did not stand for principle, but instead held back and let some innocuous hypocrisy pass us by unchallenged with the rationalization that "there's nothing we could have done about it" or "it didn't affect me that much."
Although these events seemed unimportant at the time, these small defeats, multiplied by the American population total - some 300 million - have combined to produce the situation we face today - an endless war aimed at stimulating hatred and conflicts for the ubiquitous and ever-present purpose of increasing profits for the goons who make and sell the weapons.
Why people try to hide in their own indifference is a very old question. So is why they are uneducable.
But beyond the political ramifications of this widespread indifference are the spiritual dimensions, the conversations each of us has with ourselves, either lying on a pillow in the dark late at night or taking that first hard glance in the mirror before shaving in the morning.
To a degree, you are right about the crowd mentality. Everybody wants to fit in. Our minds create and accept authority figures, and we try to live our lives according to these dictates we have accepted as legitimate to our own self-worth.
But a deeper reason exists with regard to what we choose to believe. And let me preface this by admitting I've been saying this for a long time, and haven't found all that many who agree with my opinion. But that doesn't stop me from repeating it. ''