Part 1 looked at the past through the eyes of history. Part 2 looks at today. I do remember so much of the past lives, but what purpose does that serve in our modern world? Why talk about it now? Many things that are happening in our modern world are pinging my memories, and the memories of many others.
We’re living in dangerous times. This is not the first time that those of us who SEE have felt a little frightened. We’ve been on this cliff before as I talked about in Part 1. Governments have always attempted to control information flow. Roughly 5000 years ago writing emerged, apparently independently in several places. Suddenly everyone could access information. Governments got scared and in the empires of Mesopotamia use of the written word became the sole property of the religious class. Those governments were theocracies, so the ruling class was the religious class. The flow of information was controlled by the rulers. Human curiosity could not be curbed, however, and over time the ability to read and write became something that everyone could do. It was still a slow flow of information, but it was a flow.
Then in 1439 Johannes Gutenberg made the published word available to the Europeans. Information could flow even more quickly to everyone. Once again governments, using religion as their tool, attempted to stop the dissemination of information. It was against the law to print the Bible in any language other than Latin. In fact, a lot of those burnings of heretics started over just that, people daring to read and preach the Word in their own language.
The birth of the Internet in 1991 changed the dissemination of information once again. You can now access tremendous amounts of information faster than ever before in history. Hell, I just used Wikipedia to verify my dates! The first half of the 21st century has been dominated by social media and the unbelievably rapid spread of information. How trustworthy that information is, well, I take many things with a grain of salt.
The rapid flow of information to all us average folk still terrifies governments. They are doing everything they can to control it. I know I am not the only one who sees the level of censorship on Facebook and YouTube. I also know through a source I know in person and completely trust how thoroughly our activities on the internet are tracked. That tracking started as a way to market goods and services. Now our political and religious opinions are tracked. All in the name of “keeping society safe”, just another form of religious control.
The covid “pandemic”, which spread a lot less rapidly than the regular media and social media spread the news about it, and now the distribution of vaccines has dominated our lives in the last year and a half. Fears about this virus have promoted acts of violence all over the place. Acts of anger and hate against and among various ethnic groups have definitely worked to the government’s advantage. Divide and Conquer is a time-honored way to get laws passed and control societies.
Governments have also long controlled their populations through fear. These days we’re not so much afraid of going to Hell as we are of catching a virus, or acts of violence. Our fears about international terrorism led to the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. Just this past January our federal government started working toward getting the Domestic Terrorism Act passed. It is still pending legislation, but one of its goals is to expand the incursions into the privacy of individuals that the Patriot Act started. Our fear of the virus has led to the Defense Production Act of 1950, which is the primary source of presidential authorities to expedite and expand the supply of materials and services from the U.S. industrial base needed to promote the national defense, being called into action by our current president to speed up the supply of masks, testing kits, and vaccine materials. Once more in history human societies are being controlled by governments using the tool they’ve always used, Fear.
While this blog has a decidedly political overtone, its goal is primarily to assist others to remember. A Near Death Experience brought all those memories back to me. I was almost to the point of not writing these two blogs, and then another news article sparked me into action. Panera, which used to be one of my favorite eating places, recently fired a Pennsylvania woman for no better reason than her religious beliefs. Of course the woman has sued and it is not yet resolved. It reignited my fires of memory because of the lifetimes I’ve spent being the object of, or being the tool of, such actions against humans. What I see our government doing is passing laws, exercising censorship, and using the same tools governments have always used to control the people. What’s happening now is way too similar to what I remember.
And I remember each and every time.
