The Fight They Must Not Let Us Win (compiled from a Tweet thread)

1) To the ambitious in industry, business, religion, and politics: We know sometimes your leaders work together to manipulate the rest of us. it has happened since before this country was a country. You use broadcast and published media, entertainment, commercial, & journalistic.

2) @GOP employs such manipulation strongly. To a lesser extent, but still fairly significantly, so does @DNC. @FoxNews uses such tactics & are above-board about their desire to counter "liberal bias." @CNN, @MSNBC, others go to that well, but ostensibly in a different direction.

 

3) Televised evangelism has, to a great extent, jumped onto this lucrative bandwagon. They were distorting religion's message for profiteering purposes already, but now evangelical avenues like @LibertyU, @700club, and @TBN say they want to make us a Christian nation.

 

4) What they really want is to continue exerting power, like all of these other organizations, to make the American public do their bidding and to keep the American public from threatening the financial and power base of these super-achievers, these masters of manipulation.

 

5) We have had pockets of humanity, people working in all of these areas - religion, business, politics, broadcasting - who have seen the danger and have spoken out against it. I have watched as your big corporate broadcasting machine smiled at such and gave a passing nod.

 

6) You then continued to manipulate BECAUSE YOU CAN, because it works for you, and because you adhere to a maxim stated humorously by W.C. Fields long ago: "It is morally wrong to let a sucker keep his money." Apparently, letting the gullible keep their government is wrong, too.

 

7) We don't pretend democracy can change this for certain. We don't pretend that ties with what civilized countries (like we once thought we were) call international organized crime will be broken just because we point them out. We're not even sure corruption can be voted out.

 

8) With law enforcement, governmental, and industry leaders benefiting financially from, if not also actually intimidated & threatened by, such a sinister but well established system, such a dynasty of manipulative expertise, such a social straitjacket on us all, what can we do?

 

9) We the People have been lulled to sleep by you too long. Even waking up is not enough. Even demonstrating is not enough. You catch us and soothe us again with TV, with social media, with a nice relaxing church service at the end of the week.

 

10) It's an uphill battle nobody really in power wants us, The People, to win. But perhaps the Founding Fathers did. Perhaps, to some extent, despite buying themselves into your insidious message in many shameful ways, they saw a better world.

 

11) Know this: We will fight to get that better world established, finally, for our children, and our children's children, and for the strangers' children whoever they are, even if it kills us. Because we know how you work, and how things go: It probably will.

 

Dream Diary Entry recorded June 21, 2018

I dreamed of an appointment for a sort of dental surgery. I sat in the room and chair that has occurred in several dreams of surgical procedures that I have had now, and I was having a row of teeth and jaw bone from the lower right side of my face replaced. It was an outpatient procedure, and the doctor who looked just a little, not a lot, like the Paul Reiser character in Stranger Things 2 had already removed the old teeth and bone and was showing me the surgical/dental implant that would be going in, now that I was awake from the initial anesthesia. It almost looked like a dinosaur robot bone, partially shiny and silvery, with the teeth sharp and monstrous. But I did not seem to object to the implant, and so he slid it into place as it had been manufactured to fit.

I was then free to go! And my awareness of the new teeth and gum just vanished from the story line as I walked outside to look for a bus that would take me to work. The medical office was across the street from a long, urban oval of buildings that was a kind of island shaped like the eye of a needle in a place where a highway split around it. I had to go to catch a bus on the other side of the oval of buildings, and so I crossed the street when I could. Immediately a good friend - tall, with sandy hair, but I'm not sure that it was anybody I know in real life - came up to me and was happy to walk with me around the oval to where we could both meet a bus to work. We worked our way around to the other part of the highway split just as a bus, Greyhound blue, was pulling up. My friend noticed it before I did, told me, "There's our bus!" or something like that, and sprinted toward it. Traffic and the fact that the bus was still moving slowly kept me from boarding at the same time. He disappeared in the accordion doors and the bus zoomed away. I would need to wait for the next bus. It was then that I realized that I had not even let my office know that I was going to be late, or that I had had the dental/surgical appointment. The dream ended at that point.