Partial Pictures

Although seeing part of the picture is better than not seeing the picture altogether, to ignore partial blindness or leave it untreated is a sure way to become totally blind. If we persist in calling partial pictures whole pictures and total blindness clear vision; we will ultimately lose touch with reality and the world of facts. Unable to discern one thing from the other, we may end up eating butterflies and thinking, how good they taste, or flying melons and thinking, what great kites they make. With total loss of picture, reality and rationality, we will have achieved total blindness, while think tanks, politicians, experts and mass media will have achieved total victory over vision truth and us.

Ironically, we are invariably taken or deceived by partial pictures, distorted and incomplete as they are, because they are framed by frame doctors, better known as “spin doctors”, who make them look splendid. Only those same pictures, seen whole and unframed, look anything but splendid. It is great to be the first in class with first class honours in all subjects for example, provided the rest of the students in the class are not all mentally challenged. It is as great to be victorious for that matter, assuming the one claiming victory is not an elephant, who attacked and conquered his fellow ant because she happens to have the second largest reserves in wheat, and to assert his superiority. True, achievement and victory are relative and in the eye of the beholder, but the difference between the super intelligent and the mentally challenged is consistent. So is the relationship between the size and power of an elephant to that of an ant. As long as we can a! t least recognize the two parties to the conflict, we still have hope in recovery. But when we stop seeing differences between elephants and the ants, or relationships that are consistently consistent, almost all hope is lost.

When we become totally blind, we regress from asking the wrong questions to not asking questions altogether. We “leave it to the experts” to feed us. Feed us they do, but not food for thought.

Thinking is great! Or so we are told. It is not too great when think tanks are doing the thinking. It so happens that whenever they think long and hard, we get tanks rolling in one part of the world or the other, mostly the other. They select, according to taste, certain areas as “war doable”. Then they declare people of those areas as “dysfunctional”. Somehow, it becomes their calling and their mission to fix those people in order to make them more “dysfunctional”. People of those selected areas are sold as people whose democracies have to be shaped and their religions, cultures have to be reshaped, and whose resources have to be saved from them. As far as think tanks are concerned, the only way to do it is either by force feeding GMF or the threat of use of WMD. Since “Genetically Modified Food” sounds like a poison one might buy at the drug store, and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” sounds as horrible as it does; frame doctors like to use initials to kill word association and to numb our feelings. It would be ‘Victory Day’ for “spin doctors” if we were to conduct full war conversations, using only initials with the occasional use of the full words. But to sell the whole package for an intended war, apart from the frame doctors, think tanks have a full supporting team in the form of politicians, journalists, experts and talk shows hosts. They rely on the partially blind to buy into their collective effort of creating partial pictures that look impeccable whenever portrayed on screens and in papers. In fact, some of those pictures look so irreproachable that they make many people wonder, what is wrong with the spreading of democracy and happiness for all, and how ungrateful victims can really be? That people in those “war doable” areas created great civilizations, before they were ever discovered by think tanks and thus declared “dysfunctional”, is and must remain an international secret. The thinking and unthinking international community, who are infamous for taking their vacations on seasons like ethnic cleansing and occupations sanction it.

In the case of the people of the Middle East for example, they have been declared “dysfunctional” by many an invader ever since the times of olive oil. With the discovery of oil in recent history, they have been told that they need an overhaul. People of the Middle East get this very special treatment in the reshaping process. Apart from being told that they urgently need to change their religion, culture, social and political structures; they are told they also need total remodeling in the perceptions department. This could be because People of the Middle East do not believe in conspiracy as a mere theory. They believe that Sykes Pico (1916), followed by Balfour Declaration (1917), followed by an assortment of occupations and wars, is not a figment of their imagination. They believe that what happened and is still happening is the result of the lapse in vision, which usually characterizes racist thinking in general, and the thinking of think tanks in partic! ular, whenever they think of the “others”. Realities on the ground in the Middle East lead people to think that cooking, concocting and creating conflicts that lead to wars is what some people do for a living. They think that the only difference between conspiracies of the past and modern ones is that they are now done in the open air and on lawns. They even get invited to irrational international conferences to condemn themselves, create civil and uncivil wars, and to share in the cost of self-deconstruction. All is done in the name of peace and progress. Since the history of the Middle East shows that people built great civilizations irrespective of olive or any other kind of oil, people think that whatever is needed for progress is not oil related. But rather, what all other nations need for progress, namely, peace unhindered by wars and conflicts. Instead, think tanks and Co. tell them that if it were not for their religious beliefs and chronic undemocratic thinking, the! y would not look upon the Israeli occupation in Palestine as ! occupation, ethnic cleansing as ethnic cleansing, fencing as fencing, and land grabbing as land grabbing. But would recognize that Israel is the embodiment, beacon and model of democracy. It puts you off democracy, “happiness for all” and the whole works.

But the people who really put you off happiness altogether, are the gloom and doom thinkers, who every so often, announce the death of someone or something important. One day it is the death of God, and the second day it is the death of History. Then you have things like civilization, humanity and morality in ICU. When the doom and gloom thinkers are in a happy mood, if ever, then the forecast is mere conflicts, clashes and crusades. Nowadays, we have a whole range of crusades to choose from to do God’s work. Starting with the oil, trade, food and water crusades, ending with the mother of all crusades, namely, to win the hearts, minds, ears, eyes and tongues. No doubt thinkers and think tanks love humanity; it is humans they abhor!

When it comes to utter disrespect for humans in general and human intelligence in particular, few people surpass “the experts” in the mass media that has clearly turned against the masses. To give due credit though, if it were not for the experts, we would not know that racism is back, fashionable and unapologetic. Experts are at their best when they discuss, with great confidence, Judaism, Christianity and Islam simultaneously and in between commercials. If it were not for the difference in time and age, one would think that they were in the same school, even in the same class, with all the prophets. How else can they name call, bully and trash on first name basis? Such familiarity with personalities and topics that are beyond such expert discussion does not make one so much jealous as sick. For how can one stomach being told over and over that Sharons, Hitlers and Bin Ladens are Judaism, Christianity and Islam? One does not even have to be religious in any! traditional sense of word to have indigestion. The bad news is that these same experts are also experts on psychology, mythology and folklore. In case you thought violence has one meaning, you are wrong. According to expert opinion, if killed by the right folks, you do not die you just think you did. In case you thought poverty means one thing, you are wrong again. According to expert opinion, the poor in Africa are the type who has to be liberated before every meal. The idea being that one could not possibly feel like eating if one is not liberated, or living in a democracy. Needless to say that with experts, you are almost always wrong. You are only right, if you are the kind of person who eats butterflies and flies melons. For in the battle for the hearts and minds; the strategy of the experts is to win as many hearts as possible, and for as many people as possible to lose their minds. With experts, you are only right if you are willing to be proactive in becoming voluntarily, happily and utterly blind. You are right if you abide ! by the rules of active engagement in being brainwashed. There is everything right with washing as such; it is brainwashing that is so bad.

The thing is, enemies of humanity do not find it necessary to differentiate between sheep and people. The assumption being that we share with sheep the inclination to be fed and lead. It is a very sad assumption! But assuming we do share that inclination, even assuming we are sheep, why would any shepherd blind his flock before they go to the slaughter to meet their destiny? If death is our destiny, blindness is not. Assuming that some of those shepherds actually believe they are doing God’s work; God does not say at any point that we have to be blinded before we die. As a matter of fact, God, and many other named and unnamed sources call that moment, “The Moment of Truth”. The moment when we are literally forced to see the whole picture, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is also the moment when we obviously need our vision the most.

We must never surrender our vision, rationality and our ability to find the truth. For when we lose faith in all, only then, ‘they’ willhave achieved victory over ‘us’. It is only when we suspend belief in ourselves and in our logic that we need to “leave it to the experts” to tell us the difference between an elephant and an ant, or between occupation and liberation. An occupation is an occupation. It cannot be an occupation and not an occupation at the same time. Just as ‘A cannot be an A and not an A at the same time’. Just as a butterfly cannot be a butterfly and not a butterfly at the same time. But when we declare that the first law of logic is debatable, all becomes debatable. Because, that the first law of logic is debatable, is also debatable. The debate becomes endless, meaningless and futile. If a butterfly is not really a butterfly and an occupation is not really an occupation, then nothing is really! what it is or what it means. When the debate becomes endless; the point, the picture and the truth will always be lost. What is not and must not be debatable is the simple difference between vision and blindness. That does not even need thinking, nor does it need an expert’s opinion.