The Best of Mariah Carey: THE GREATEST OF HUMAN ACCOMPLISHMENTS

WHAT IS HUMANITY’S GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT?

Everyone has an opinion about this issue. Undoubtedly there are many contenders; some people will say that it is the splitting of the atom; others the flight into outer space. There are those who abdicate that man’s cumulative knowledge allowed him to do all these things: defy the law of gravity, fly like a bird, look into nature’s most infinitely small components, heal the sick and prolong life defeating sickness and even defying death.

But I think one of the ones that should be right up there is the computer. It has enable man to communicate with one another; it has brought information right into his home and with it has come the unavoidable: the ability to think and to have knowledge at his fingertips.

“And the truth shall set you free” so goes the saying and it is so poignantly relevant with information disseminated by the computer. There are possibilities of disinformation and the spreading of rumors and lies; but these soon crumble in due time by the preponderance of the truth itself.

We have been able to record what people have said in the past; either in written form or verbally. When a politician has made a statement it has been recorded for posterity; this makes it rather difficult to backtrack and to muddy the issue with claims like: “I never said that”. But most importantly, the computer has forced mankind itself to be more truthful. It is no surprise then that tyrannical governments try to keep its citizenry from having access to computers and the internet…you see it in North Korea, Cuba and Iran. It is detrimental to their survival so they have to keep the masses ignorant; much in the same way that the Church kept the general population ignorant for centuries in order to maintain its power. The Church even refused to accept concepts like “The earth is not flat” or “The earth goes around the sun and not the other way around”. The Pope was infallible and that was that.

In its present form, suppression of information is no longer coming from the church although they continue to try…the new powers at the top are the big corporations and the super rich. It is in their best interest that the general public doesn’t know all that much and that they are given little information and at times the wrong information in order to preserve their interests; we saw a perfect example of this with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill where BP would deliberately put out the wrong information and even carried massive advertising campaigns in order to appear more benign and “on top of it”. Now we see how they are trying to shy away from responsibility and even employing what I call extortion, telling us that unless they are given the rights to drill in deep waters again they will not be able to pay for the damage they have caused…that my friends takes testicular fortitude. It is no wonder then that a lot of us give President Obama kudos for insisting that BP gives 22 billion dollars right up front…even if some Republicans called it a “shakedown” and even some who apologized publicly for it.

The disturbing aspect of all this is that we have very powerful individuals pulling on the strings that makes America, the world economy and even ourselves just limbs on the body of a marionette, puppets in the grip of charlatans like Limbaugh and Beck. People like the Koch brothers have made it their lifelong endeavor to create organizations and entities that will impose their askew point of view on the rest of us.

There are individuals like Michael Moore who spend their whole life trying to bring us the truth while others like Limbaugh and Beck concentrate on being outrageous for profit and bringing hatred and division. Others like Anita Bryant and the Mormons/Evangelicals continue in their efforts to push their religious views on the rest of us and would like nothing better than to turn America into a theocracy.

Corporations also have done a great deal of it themselves. We saw but the tip of the iceberg during last year’s HEALTHCARE REFORM debates…it was not even a debate…it became a one way diatribe by the pundits and the special interests that were acting in essence as the proxies of insurance companies. The lobbyists were successful in not only stopping the more important points of this legislation but they also were able to obtain concessions that would actually benefit health insurance companies.

When I say that misinformation does not last very long out there, and the lies and misleading tactics only work if the population is ignorant…we have a good example of this with President Bush lies about WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION…this was arguably the most egregious of his many lies because the world eventually found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Yet, those responsible for over four thousand of our soldiers dead and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties…will go about with impunity…will have gotten away with a very nasty lie.