You Have to Wake Up. You Are Not Stupid.

Republicans/Conservatives/Religious-Right people ARE NOT STUPID. If you take a normally intelligent human being with a properly functioning brain and surround them with people who all believe a certain way, and that way turns out to be how generations were manipulated to behave and think, and if that manipulation is done by powerful, influential and shrewd people exercising control over the voices that a societal group hears, then a smart person can become a manipulated person. You are not surrounded by voices or ideas that are more sound and gain better traction in your head. You define good and sound ideas by what is around you. That is a significant part of what you have to work with, even when you pick up a book with challenging ideas and interpret the words you see. Your intelligence, even your genius will come out in other ways, cleverness and creativity that fit in with how those societal voices, those shrewd and powerful influences, want you to be. And if you were born into any kind of privilege for the color of your skin, your gender, your religion, etc, you have enjoyed a certain amount of comfort and happiness based largely on how circumstances are for you. Your comfort will dictate how well you think everything is going with the ideology you have learned from your surrounding society.

It's not always exactly a bubble, but it's quite a vortex, a gravity well of status quo, to even want to crawl out of. And when people call you stupid, that's a gloss and an error, and YOU KNOW IT. And so you will be understandably upset, and you will reject whatever other message they've got, even if that message will be that you were manipulated into your world view and that society and government - everyone, really - will be better off if you can manage to CRAWL OUT OF THAT VORTEX.

But right now, the man currently occupying the White House, and what the GOP has become by letting the extremists run the show, not to mention what has happened to a large portion of the evangelical Christian church ... all of these things stand as a kind of reductio ad absurdum to what you've been manipulated to believe. It's the conclusion you reach, the Lego structure you build, when you follow the instructions poorly, or use the wrong ones. You're not stupid, but yes, you now believe some actually ridiculous ideas, and they are all for the benefit of the generations of the few powerful who made you and your ancestors and the people in society around you believe their lies and manipulations. They justified slavery, they justified genocide, they justified the supremacy of one race over others, or one gender over the other, or one religion over all. And many, many otherwise smart people bought into it and kept that corrupt machine running. And it has led us to a ridiculous state of affairs.

This has happened, in other ways and to other extents, to human beings all throughout history. But now it is happening to you. I leave you with words from a television show I love, but don't pay attention to that detail - they are completely taken out of their original context because THEY ARE IMPORTANT TO YOU and to American government, to our existence as a nation, right now:

"You have to wake up. Don't die. Don't die."