2018 Jun 12

15 minutes: It's hard work

It's hard work blocking it out. All of it out.

If it didn't come in through the television or radio, it came in through other vessels. The people we meet, our relatives, our friends. None of them were immune

Not all of them were trying to block out the messages. So they carried it in with them. And if we wanted to interact with them, we couldn't help but expose ourselves to what they brought in. In some ways, it was slightly better, since it was secondhand at that point, though many of our acquaintances believed these messages so thoroughly they might as well have been a firsthand source.

The only way to be completely free and safe would be complete isolation from society. But that was not an option we were willing to consider. Not yet. We depended too much on the other things society provided for us.

Food. Medicine. Energy. Health care.

There was no way to visit the doctor without at least some of his values rubbing off on us. And we would need to debrief one another after each trip into the outside world. Detox in the decontamination room.

This was no way to live. In order to free our minds, we were trading away our physical freedom. Those that attempted to go it alone, to wander the wilderness without outside contact, were forced to live lives we were not prepared for.

We had bought into the dream. We had paid for it with our sweat and our sleepless nights. But we were not prepared to discover that the advertising was false. That the road they put us on was only for their own benefit, with nothing at the end except empty promises.

So now we had to block them out. But the promises were so sweet. So tempting. A siren song beckoning us to our doom. Yet we could not resist. We tried to tape our ears shut, but we were too few. Their chorus was infectious, and their song leaked in every day.

The balance between physical survival and assimilation into their culture was too hard to strike. I didn't expect the battle to be won in our lifetime. Not without massive collapse. But collapse wasn't something we wished for either.

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