Sorry to have been AWOL - a bad few days - not only being scammed by an aggressive roofer and handling family issues - my sister is not aging well - she needs a community and now that her dog has died she is really alone - plus I've been in a bad way - anniversary of my son's death - that still brings pain since I could not be there - was in NC and driving clear across to the mountains of New Mexico, no matter how hard I kick myself was not really viable. My youngest son still lived in Lubbock and he took care of everything.
I just need to share part of his last letter to me - I'm hoping it will be OK, all my friends have died in the last 3 and 4 years and y'all are closer than most and I think you may understand, Peter was a reader and had a group of folks that met at a coffee shop and discussed topics that prompted more reading - he also would write for grants for the local Pueblo to obtain funds to further their arts program. Here is part of Peter's letter -
"But mass production requires mass consumption, and mass consumption requires mass thought, for if people remain unique and independent in mind and spirit, then mass production will fail. It can succeed only when the masses have the same tastes and desires, the same wants and needs and beliefs. It can succeed only when, in short, most everyone thinks alike.
And what better way to do this than to order children from their homes and force them, under the guise of “education,” into indoctrination centers where they would systematically learn not to think for themselves and to become totally dependent upon others? As Gatto says, “through the dependence of all on the few, an instrument of management and of elite association would be created far beyond anything every seen in the past. This powerful promise was, however, fragilely balanced atop the need to homogenize the population and all its descendent generations. A mass production society can neither be created nor sustained without a leveled population, one conditioned to mass habits, mass tastes, mass enthusiasms, predictable mass behaviors. The will of both maker and purchaser had to give way to the predestined output of machinery with a one-track mind”.
“School,” said Horace Mann, one of the founders of the American forced schooling system, “is the cheapest police” and, according to Gatto, “it was a sentiment publicly spoken by every name . . . prominently involved in creating universal school systems”. Forcing all children into schools helped to “stabilize the social order and train the ranks.” Schools, he says, “build national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality, and family life”. It teaches them the same myths about the nation, about its government’s leaders and its history.
Modern schooling in America , says Gatto, provides “not intellectual development, not character development, but the inculcation of a new synthetic culture in children, one designed to condition its subjects to a continual adjusting of their lives by unseen authorities”. They “train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy . . . requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between ‘Cheers’ and ‘Seinfeld’ is a subject worth arguing about”.
But schooling only provides half the answer. After all, children can only attend school for so many hours in a day. Thanks to modern technology, however, the rest of the time the television can tend them and help keep their minds straight. After all, as Wes Moore said in his essay Television: Opiate of the Masses, television is “one of the most potent mind control devices ever produced.”
But chances are that they’ll spend the majority of that time watching television. Wes Moore claims the average American spends four hours watching television every day. watching television acts exactly like a drug on the human body, producing endorphins, which are structurally identical to opium and its derivatives. Also, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it also shuts down the questioning and critical left hemisphere of the brain, which controls our language and our logic, while emphasizing the accepting and non-critical right hemisphere."
