TALL TALES
Conspiracy theories are nothing new. I remember the first one told to me. I was 5 years old and riding my new bicycle up and down the sidewalk in front of my house, allowed to go on my own only from the corner to the first alley and back again. There had been a flurry of children’s voices for the past few days talking about a monster who had moved into the neighborhood. It sounded so creepy to my five year old mind. I tried to avoid those conversations.
We lived on the Southside, surrounded by former German/Irish and new Italian immigrants. The Southside of any factory town always means the latest to arrive, or the poorest unable to move on, live there. The Southside of any town is where the river flows, and train tracks are laid out. The downwind side where the smog of factories collects in the air and flows down from their smoke towers, while the effluent chemicals left over from production drain into the river. In our neighborhood the Tectum factory dump lay near the river surrounded by an earthen bank hiding most of it from the street. But, the rejected sheets of shredded wood fiber held together by cementitious binder had piled so high it was visible. The air was filled with grey dust throughout the neighborhood. Playing on the dusty, unstable pile was forbidden. A true incentive to explore was unleashed by Mom’s warnings. That forbidden dump was a mystery to solve. Bored children, not yet solely rational thinkers, were drawn there like flies to…a word a five year old girl was not allowed to say.
The day I first found myself captured by a conspiracy theory is one I have never forgotten. The children noticed I had no interest in their gleeful one-ups-manship stories of the monster. The latest version was that he stole into homes at night. I asked why no one ever actually saw this monster. They responded “because it was night and everyone was asleep!” The monster was stealing jewels, candlesticks, and silverware. I raised an eyebrow at that comment! No one in my neighborhood had jewels or silver and gold anything. There was little worth stealing in our homes. With each disbelieving question I asked the children became more incensed by my disbelief. They considered how to “get me,” as bullies are eager to do. The only thing to be done was to issue a challenge and defeat me somehow.
The challenge was this: Ride to the end of this street, turn left and ride to the river. Climb the embankment into the Tectum Dump. Climb the pile. That is where the monster sleeps during the day. If you do not think he is real, you will do this. Uh oh. There were so many things wrong with this I shook my head “no” at first. If the monster did not kill me and eat me as the children avowed he would, my mother would kill me when she found out. But, proving that there was no monster, and stopping lies which were scaring innocent children like me, seemed worth the risk.
The children followed me all the way up the street. I pedaled as fast as I could, which was so slow they easily kept up with me, chanting scary threats all the way. I stopped at the corner, reassessing the plan. The river seemed so far away, the longest block I would ever traverse alone.
My delay simply fueled the bullying chants. So I turned left and started up the street, pedaling faster than I ever had before. My feet were flying, my hands sweating. So wet, it made it hard to hold onto the handlebars. None of the children left the corner. They remained silent and watched. There could be no retreat.
I made it to the embankment by the river, praying Hail Mary’s all the way. I dropped my bike and ran up the embankment with my eyes closed, saying the Guardian Angel prayer. My knees shook. I felt nauseous. I stood at the top, opened my eyes and looked down into the dump. It looked threatening but I saw no monster. I heard shouting and turned to see children gathered still on the corner saying I had to go in to the dump. So, I did. I climbed that pile and smiled a smile as wide as my smile had ever been, or will ever be. There was not monster. It was all a lie.
I stayed awhile and picked some wild flowers. Long enough so that the children might think I had been eaten alive and was never coming out. I waded in the river awhile. Finally, I gathered my flowers and climbed back out and onto the street, climbed onto my bike and pedaled slowly back to the corner offering the flowers to the children silently riding home.
I had no supper that night. Penance for disobeying my Mother, and for allowing tall tales told by idiot children who cared nothing for my safety to lead me into danger. Mom warned me that I would be told a lot of tall tales (1950s description of conspiracy theories) in my life; and, I would be a fool to believe any of them. She was right.
annarino writes 
SEEING IS BELIEVING
Do you remember diagramming sentences. Your answer will tell me how old you are. It is a part of the human condition to believe what we know is the full truth. That what we perceive is full reality. My first science project in school led me to state finals and a blue ribbon. The title was “Seeing is believing ?” I studied optical illusions and, created activities demonstrating how what we see is not what really is. It was a mind-opening experience for me and for those who came to my table display. It started a need within me to open minds and challenge thoughts.
My second science project was the new (then) study of genetics. I was particularly interested in how RNA carried messages from the DNA throughout the body. Planaria have an ability to regenerate themselves. Cut off the upper half and it regrows a new upper half. The implications from that study left me in awe of possibilities such as regenerative limbs, eyes, body organs. It also made me question leadership and political growth and regrowth of political parties. For example, I wondered what the Asian subcontinent would have looked like if the British had embraced Ghandi rather than destroy him. Cutting off the leadership of a group may simply create regrowth one finds even more difficult to deal with. What if Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had been embraced instead of assassinated?
Of course, those RNA studies also prepared me to be first in line for Covid vaccination using MRNA technology. Medicine is on a new frontier since the human genome was mapped. Continued research opens up myriad possibilities for human health. As usual, when I think of physical health it also stirs an interest in emotional and psychological health. RNA is on the forefront of research of mental health as well. Then, I wonder what lessons such research teaches us about the social health of our communities, institutions, political structures and all groups.
The United States is singular as a nation which daily adds new DNA to its mix through immigration. Immigration is our RNA carrying new ideas, new ways of perceiving, new challenges to our perception of reality and opening our minds to previously unthought-of possibilities. Immigration is the source of our American body’s innovation and intellectual wealth which fuels our national economy.
Years ago I read articles decrying our education system because our students did not perform so well as Chinese students on standardized tests for comparison of intellectual status. What those articles seldom mentioned was that American students far outpaced students from other nations when creativity and innovation in problem solving was being measured. Instead of recognizing where our strength lies and enhancing teaching methodology to accommodate and pursue such strengths, politicians inserted their nationalistic noses into education and began requiring more standardized tests, more frequently, with worse results. Teachers now “teach to the test” instead of “to the student.”
Now, under the guise of American nationalism, Republicans push to control education even more by banning books, firing and un-licensing teachers who teach about racism, sexism, gender, and anything that even hints at a non-monolithic American (read white-male)identity and belief system. Such arrogant and ignorant intervention will not only destroy our educational system and those who are educated by it; it will destroy our national economy, Indeed, it will destroy our very nation itself. Such fools admire autocrats such as Turkey’s Erdogan, Belarus’ Lukashenko, China’s Xi, Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orban ; and American governors such as Florida’s DeSantis, Texas’ Abbot and others like Ohio’s DeWine who play footsie with such autocrats as Trump, McCarthy, Jordan et al. Republican politicians pay state visits, dine at their table, and praise them for their “strong” (iron-fisted) leadership; offering them as examples of the type of leadership America needs.
Voters should be wary of what they see in paid political ads, many funded by dollars given to fake charitable organizations (PACS) which are in fact propaganda machines, often carrying talking points prepared by foreign governments intent on undermining American democracy. Why would foreign autocratic leaders want to undermine democracy? Money! Autocrats do not simply control the lives of the people they rule. They control the means of production, the salary levels and profit margins, the wealth of their nations is their personal wealth. It no longer belongs to the people. The people have no say in how wealth is garnered, stored, maintained and spent. Its only purpose is to serve the autocrats. Undermine the examples of countries where the people rule their politicians, not vice-versa, and political leadership means greater wealth for the politician, but not the nation. The power of the gun lobby over republicans is an example of putting economic gain over public benefit here at home. We, the American voters, are the greatest threat to autocrats world-wide. They would destroy the example we set when we vote out corruption, and assert our control over our government. We do that peaceably by voting. Voting is our greatest strength and best protection.
Now, Republicans, more than ever, seek to undermine the power of our vote. They lie about election fraud, poll workers, election outcomes. They fuel distrust in fellow voters. They suppress the vote of those who challenge their leadership. They accept funding from foreign governments to boost such lies. The seek to place election deniers in Secretary of State offices, on county election boards, as poll workers etc. in order to control school board, local, state and nationwide elections. Republicans are now openly autocrats. How do they get away with this ?
I taught law as an Associate Professor in the colleges of Business, Medicine, Education and Social Work while also acting as Assistant Attorney General and Associate Director of Legal Affairs for Ohio University before retiring. I always started with discourse on the Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights before I even began to use the casebook we would be using for that particular academic field of study. When I began, I was looking through the lens of my own educational experience. The students soon opened my eyes to new ways of looking at their readiness to understand law. I had summed they had been given a sound background in principles of democracy, civics, government and American history. I was wrong to assume so. Such courses were no longer “mandatory for graduation” course requirements. Very few of my students even knew there are three branches of government and that each branch creates law. I first had to teach American democratic principles, policies, structures and history before the cases I would teach them to decipher. I also scheduled a second classroom two nights per week to teach English grammar and writing to those who wanted a prayer of passing my essay exams. The first batch was unintelligible, lacking sound sentence and paragraph structure, and grammar. When I wrote a sentence on the board and asked for a volunteer to diagram it, no one volunteered. Instead I faced a class full of quizzical looks. They had no idea what a diagram was and had never heard of such a thing. I only did this for my first year of teaching, when my class size of 30 plus students still allowed for the time required. Soon, my glasses grew to 200-300 and I, ashamedly, resorted to multiple choice tests.
I know how so many Americans are duped by the Republican party today. They have been undereducated for several decades. We stopped supporting public schools since integration required us to face the results of our history of racism face-to-face, with real people instead of the racial tropes we had devised to assure us of our noble humanity. Recognizing equality was a slap in the face of white America. No one likes to take a hit. Better to pretend and create the illusion of superiority, instead of openly investigating our true historical reality. The Republican party was cut in half and has regenerated a disturbing adherence to autocratic rule, even if it requires divorcing itself, and us, from reality. This is not a true political party, but a cult, based on optical illusions and fear of facing the reality that no one is superior in a true democracy. No vote is superior in a true democracy, unless Republicans gerrymander those votes. Ah, yes, that they did! It seems, they still fear that even gerrymandering is not enough. How far will they go? To armed insurrection at our Nation’s Capitol and beyond ? Guess we know the answer. Go vote.
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Tagged as AUTOCRATS, election, optical illusions, Republican Party, VOTE