On this eleventh anniversary of 9/11, I’m noticing that I
have a number of friends whose energies remain possessed by deceptions by which
either the government itself, or corporate interests in league with government,
are bamboozling us all.
Statecraft and deception have long gone hand in hand. Terrible
chains of causation have sprung from government lies; in my own lifetime the
Gulf of Tonkin Declaration stands out. Lyndon Johnson apparently felt he needed
a solid casus belli to justify a
declaration of war upon North Vietnam, so he apparently arranged to pretend
that our navy had been fired upon, plunging us into an ocean of blood and
napalm.
Three major conspiracy theories that preoccupy my honorable
friends are built around the assassination of President Kennedy, the true cause
of the destruction of the twin towers and adjacent buildings on 9/11, and the
possibility that someone is spraying aluminum powder into the clouds above us
to change weather patterns. In the last of these three, the implication is that
Monsanto or other powerful corporate/government entities will come to exercise
mega-control over agricultural processes and rake in scads of money.
I am no more able to know than any average citizen who
killed JFK, how the towers were brought down, or whether global weather
patterns are being deliberately altered by human agency. With horrified but
also skeptical fascination, I have watched some of the documentaries and read
some of the books and glanced at some of the websites. I certainly agree with
my friends that it will be difficult to build a solid future for our republic
on rotted structures of deception.
It is at least plausible that John Kennedy could have been
killed by elements of the CIA that were unhappy with his supposedly dovish
stance toward the Soviet Union. It is very far-fetched, but within the realm of
remote possibility, that agents unknown carefully placed explosives within the
World Trade Center buildings to doubly assure their fall. And it is possible
that corporate/governmental agencies could be performing “geo-engineering”
experiments in the atmosphere; the atomic tests in the West in the 1950s, done
without the knowledge of ordinary people living downwind, suggest a familiar
precedent. If Monsanto is indulging in the obscene hubris of seeding clouds,
I’d certainly like to know about it.
Their genetic manipulation of seeds on earth seems unsettling enough.
It’s my planet too.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they can tempt
our minds into a projective mechanism that leads ultimately to helplessness
rather than healthy action. If we project into reality the existence of hidden
forces that are so omniscient that they can act with impunity and completely hide
their own tracks, our own motives and energy for positive change are subtly weakened.
The more power we cede to the conspiracy, the greater can be our excuse to feel
powerless and to do nothing other than stew.
Related to this willed helplessness is the wide-open conspiracy
of our own complicity: today we live in a world where we can’t escape the fact
that we ourselves are each responsible for the same changes that we might like
to project onto dark uncontrollable forces: how each of us lives, in aggregate,
is affecting the climate far more than any corporate great Satan. Because there
are no international agreements—yet—for resolving many of our transnational challenges,
we can become more vulnerable to anxiety and numbed paralysis.
Before we let secret conspiracies leach away our initiative,
we ought to examine our complacent tolerance of fully daylit conspiracies that allow,
for example, thousands of children to die each day unnecessarily of
malnutrition and disease. Not a single child less would die if we knew for
certain who killed JFK.
Calculations have been done to show that with a small
fraction of the yearly defense budget of the United States, we could fund solutions
to global problems that we clearly know will be the cause of future wars. We
could get population growth under control, feed the hungry, transition out of
the era of fossil fuels, mitigate C02’s effect upon our atmosphere, and supply clean
water, basic health care, and education to everyone on earth. How much longer will
we conspire with ourselves to maintain the illusion that military dominance alone
can address these issues? It is our condition to be awash both in what we may
never know—and what we know all too well.
