Numb or Dumb?

 Are Americans numb or dumb? The 'cognizant dissonance' explanation is rapidly becoming irrelevant; no one can explain it simply enough to be effectively understood by 'normal' Americans, dumbed-down products of a misnamed 'public education' system.

Tragically, there are too many citizens too dumb to comprehend the depths of government's terrors past and present much less what it has in store for the future. Many of those who've made every effort to keep up – despite government's propensity for prevarication and the damp shroud covering real news by the MSM – have entered the early throes of sensory overload. The steady avalanche of bad news and increasing pressures of everyday life via inflation, job security, and burdens of insidious government regulatory mandates are creating a rapidly growing infection of contagious apathy rather than the virulent outrage it so richly deserves. 

And needs.

In the not-too-distant past, local, state and federal government operatives would get summarily slapped back whenever they pushed their authoritative luck thanks to their aggressive assumptions of power. Today, those assumptions have become SOP as seen by righteously objecting parents hauled off in cuffs for impolitely objecting to repulsive school curricula they don't want inflicted on young Silas and Olivia.

Fear and intimidation, government's two most favorite and effective tools used against free citizens, are more prevalent today than ever. From 'woke' to 'PC' to truncated sources of accurate information, a population hobbled by aggressive ignorance and an addiction to the instant gratification of materialism defines the 'existential' part of the 'existential threat' to a “free” society. (Free is in quotes because we aren't. A reading of the Patriot Act, NDAA and other supporting legislation your representatives vote to renew because Terrorism! provides ample proof.

Imagine being apprehended by federal agents and locked in solitary confinement without charges, explanation, access to counsel, or the outside world. Indefinitely. This is not hysteria or exaggeration; this is reality today. An undetermined number of fellow citizens are so incarcerated today, some over 2 years. Imagine yourself confined 23 hrs/day for an alleged crime not formerly made not even revealed. Think you could maintain your sanity under such conditions? What about your family, literally not knowing if your dead or alive? The government can and does withhold this information with impunity; the law your representative likely voted to renew authorizes it.

I refuse to say this is the 'tip of the iceberg' because, aside from being a trite cliché, even the tippy tip is too big to be synonymous with “small”. The sins of the government are as macabre as they are innumerable. They morph a gecko into a Leviathan.

Rationalization is one of our mind's best defense mechanisms. Even casual use enables us to re-arrange loathsome facts or choices into something acceptable, even desirable. Rationalizing a frightening reality can make it disappear, at least from conscious consideration. Any illegal, immoral, unconstitutional governmental action is easily dismissed with just a smidgen of rationalization. While horror disappears, it isn't eliminated. It grows exponentially until reality overwhelms rationalization.

What now? Lack of awareness, apathy, disbelief (that cognizant dissonance thing) has left few, acceptable options. This might be a good time to bone up on the facts surrounding us while the opportunity for evasive action is available.

“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

- Ayn Rand