Tag: Politics

Chicken Little Politics aka Gun Control.

U.S. Presidential flag, 1960-present (not usua...
U.S. Presidential flag, 1960-present (not usually called a “standard” in official U.S. government terminology). It is defined in Executive Order 10860. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Everybody knows the story of Chicken Little. The small fry chicken who gets hit in the head by some debris and then runs around like a headless chicken telling everyone the sky is falling. Of course it transpires that the sky is not falling and that Chicken Little was panicking for no reason. Of course the moral of this story is be sure of the information you’re spreading around, it might just be wrong.

Or how about the little boy who cried wolf?  Another childhood story that deals with a boy responsible for looking out for a flock of sheep. This mini Shepard got bored with this glum and thankless task and took to running into town and telling everyone that a wolf was attacking the sheep. After the towns people ran out several times only to find that the boy had lied, when the wolf did finally show up, no-one believed him and all the sheep got eaten (and depending on the version of the story you might or might not have seen, the boy got nom-nommed as well).

The moral of this story was a bit similar to the Chicken Little parable, don’t lie or make up stories because one day it might really happen and no one will believe you.

I only thought of these two childhood morality tales when I was reading a few of the more spectacular Tweets on Twitter about gun control and the government conspiracy to take guns away from the great American public.

I will admit that I also thought of both these stories when the Bush administration was busy ladling out huge doses of fear and paranoia about weapons of mass destruction and how they were on the cusp of being used against innocent American citizens. The Bush presidential two-term run made sure that the American people were too terrified to ask questions and to wonder why everything had gotten  so bad. The entire eight year term proved what the conspiracy theorists had said all along.

The government is lying to you. And guess what? They’ve been doing it since the birth of the nation. Now you won’t find this out from history classes or the ”sanctioned’ history texts used by the educational institutes in America. You have to dig a bit deeper and look at tomes written by PHD students who have dug around and found out things about our government that they really don’t want you to know.

I had my eyes opened when I was a junior in High School. Our American history teacher told an amusing story about how the first President of the United States was almost fired. That’s right, George Washington, the father of our country was almost booted out of office in his first term.

Why?

Well George had a thing for the ladies. He also told congress not to bother giving him a huge salary, he’d just like his expenses paid, if you don’t mind. C0ngress  said that would be just fine, until they got those first expense sheets back. It turned out that George liked to buy his ‘ladies’ gifts as a gesture of appreciation. It also turned out that President Washington has a lot of appreciation to hand out. He almost broke the governmental coffers. He was told off and had his expense account discontinued and there was a lot of talk about having him replaced.

You won’t read that in a classroom text on American History. Out teacher found out from another university student that she knew who had based his thesis on it.

When I was in Southern California I found out from a professional photographer about how the United States forced Japan into the Second World War by placing an embargo on their oil. By stopping the oil coming into the country they stopped all production of things the Japanese needed to survive, so they in turn, declared war on the US.

That also won’t be found in a text book.

Conspiracy theories notwithstanding we already know that the truth about any given situation that the government deems ‘safe’ to relate to the masses is homogenized and pasteurized beyond all recognition of the real facts of what really happened, Is it any wonder that a lot of folks think that conspiracies lurk behind every corner?

I wrote earlier that I thought it was a bit too convenient, this ‘midnight massacre’ incident. Happening just when the government wants to change the gun control laws. With the President about to sign the United Nations Arms Trade Control Treaty on the 27th of July and with a large population of Americans up (if you’ll pardon the pun) in arms about; it is there really any surprise that folks think that the incident was rigged?

It’s like the government saying, “See we told you the current gun laws were bad. Just look what happened!” Just like Chicken Little or the boy who cried wolf, the government are telling us that not only is the sky falling, but that a big bad wolf is going to eat us up before we’re crushed by the debris.

I would have thought that after an eight year reign of ‘ruling by terror’ we would have learned to be a bit more cynical about the government and how they control the masses. I am not in any way detracting from the horror of what happened in a crowded movie theatre in Colorado.

What I am doing is questioning it and wondering how much of the conspiratorial hysteria is just hysterical finger pointing, looking for the wolf who isn’t there or shouting that, “Hey! The sky is falling asshole and it’s going crush all of us!” Or are they right, that this has been coldly and cruelly organised to show how right the government will be in taking away our right to bear arms.

Unfortunately with conspiracies and cover-ups, only time will reveal their presence. It is only after the dust settles that we can find out that the wolf was here and it was he who made the sky fall.

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