Happy, Or Well-Informed?

Source: Mr. Fish

Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone has an uncanny ability to put into words what I'm incoherently feeling or thinking. Sometimes my ruminations are at the sub-conscious level, but not this time. Her latest column, "How To Be Happy In A Genocidal Dystopia On A Dying World," addressed something I encounter all the time: feeling like the turd in the punch bowl at gatherings of the vast majority in the U.S. who prefer ignorance over knowledge.

You don’t need to choose between being happy and being well-informed, is how Caity put it.

This is precisely the claim of the affluent legions who studiously avoid current events, preferring not to see the imperial wars and economic exploitation that underpins their lifestyle. Slavery moved offstage, if you will. 

The peer pressure to conform in this group is immense while often remaining largely invisible.

A doctor once told me after one too many glasses of wine that he would have loved to join our weekly bridge protest of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, "but I'm afraid it would hurt my standing in the community."

When he saw people he knew out in public with signs like "Depleted Uranium Is A War Crime" it was hard to ignore. Solution for most encountering this cognitive dissonance: turn on NPR, or read corporate "news." Let yourself be lulled back into a state of blissful ignorance about what your tax dollars are really funding.

Many, many people have claimed they cannot face facts about wars and genocides because it bums their high. I have come around to believing that this isn't actually true. 

A clue is that they are fine consuming information about historical or fictional wrongs such as violence against innocent people. Gruesome murders that didn't actually happen but were created so that fictional detectives could solve them, providing a diverting intellectual exercise for readers or viewers. Murderous empires that exist only in fantasy. This habit appears to lead to more happiness, not less.

I think the real problem is different. My mother expressed it succinctly when I nagged her to share a Noam Chomsky book my son had lent her. Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance was a slim volume -- and my mother was a voracious reader -- so I couldn't figure out why months later she still had not passed the book along to me. Her explanation finally emerged: I was so consumed by guilt that I could hardly read more than a page at a time.

Born in dire poverty in 1932, my mother nonetheless felt responsible for her role in looking the other way while the U.S. empire ravaged the world. Probably this intensified after her marriage ended. Though both my parents loved harpooning sacred cows, it was my father who was far more willing and likely to call out the elephants in rooms (how's that for large mammal mixed metaphors?).

People don't want to know the truth about U.S. foreign policy because if they did they might have to do something about it. 

And, for whatever reason, they believe that the imperative to take some active responsibility is going to ruin their day.

I think another Caitlin Johnstone gem is relevant here: 

Being born into western civilization is like waking up in the middle of a massive lynch mob.[emphasis mine] 

Something terrible is happening, and everyone’s going along with it and telling you it’s fine and it’s normal, and even if you’re able to figure out that what they’re doing is wrong in all the chaos and confusion you find yourself powerless to stop them, because the whole thing has so much momentum already and there are far too many people blindly caught up in the frenzy of bloodlust for you to make everyone change course. Just continuing to live among them makes you complicit in their actions in many ways, but you have nowhere else to go besides this lynch mob town you were born into. 

But I came here to say this: getting active in resisting the evil empire is the best! It's often cold, discouraging, demoralizing, and challenging BUT you meet the nicest people doing this kind of work. One such person is my friend Yussra whose recent thoughts on the role of pets in the vacuous morality of Western liberals may well be a corollary to my topic here.

Photo: Mary Beth Sullivan

A final thought: at a rally last weekend organized by Healthcare Workers 4 Palestine in Maine, a soccer mom shared her recent awakening to the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza. She was experiencing the dawning realization that she was alone among her friends and neighbors in reaching this understanding. It was lonely, she said, but also invigorating, and she felt deep gratitude for the activists standing beside her in the snow -- willing not only to witness the ugly truth but to try and do something about it.