Do you Ever Ask Yourself Why?

[AdHocSolver]

20. It is not just the so-called news media that makes one feel powerless.

The entire culture has been designed to make people feel powerless.

The educational system is geared to rote learning of a narrow range of mostly disconnected "facts".(which may, or may not, actually be factual).

Real learning involves making things (tools, music, art), fixing things, and solving problems. Teaching to a test that involves memorizing a bunch of disconnected and disjointed data, does not give anyone the ability to accomplish anything useful.

No Child Left Behind and its equally worthless successor Race To The Top actually numbs the mind and prevents real learning from taking place.

The U.S. economy is shaky, at best. The economic indicators are bogus. The stock market is manipulated by the 1 percent to suck up the savings of the middle class. Ask anyone who had their retirement savings in Enron stock.

The Federal Reserve is now run by Wall Street, the way so-called economic indicators are defined and used are bogus, and yet most people still cling to the nonsense about the economy.

For example, the Fed keeps the interest rate on deposit accounts artificially low (0.1 percent) yet charges 14 percent on credit card balances, claiming that there is almost no inflation, and low interest rates will boost economic activity.

Yet the extremely low interest paid on deposits means that inflation is eating up the principal of depositors' assets, and 14 percent on credit card balances is sucking up the money that middle class borrowers could use to buy more goods.

Until enough people learn to differentiate reality from the propaganda about the economy spewed by Wall Street, nothing is going to change.

There is another way that the 1 percent control the populace and that is by computerizing everything. The computer determines what the user can and cannot do. The computer can log every action of the user which eliminates privacy. The computer acts as a gate keeper for the corporations, and when the corporations screw up, they can "blame the computer" even though they are responsible for what the computer does or does not do.

However, just turning off your television won't save you from the propaganda. People must learn how they are being manipulated and ways to avoid the manipulation.

One has to learn how to deal with others around you who are still being affected by the manipulation and propaganda. One has to try to educate them, and then join with, and mutually support, others who understand the situation.

There is a lot to fear about what is happening these days. Use the fear to spur you to action to learn the reality and join with others to change what causes the fear.