It's All In Your Head

Zombie, zombie, zombie- eh? eh? eh?

I recently posted this submission about the upside down culture in which we live. I pointed out the mistaken focus on elevating victims as role models. I clearly made the point that my case wasn’t against the victims but of the cultural focus and the values that idealized and elevated victims to role model status.

I got a reasoned response from someone calling his/her/zerself “Erin Brochovic.” I would like to share that comment here along with my edited response to it after having a little time to make it more unambiguous.

“Erin Brochovic”

I found this article to be very well meaning but confused or mislead..the people she refers to as “weak or downtrodden or ill” are usually very oppressed people who are facing racial, gender based or other forms of discrimination, oppression by the state, denial of land rights, over work, under pay, mass poisoning by cumulative agricultural poisons that cause metabolic poisoning too, people stressed and poisoned into cancer, illness, weakness, sometimes obesity from stress and poisoning and even death..

If she think people are the problem not the system that stomps them into mental and physical illness.then I just think she is focusing on the wrong thing… fix the system that destroys and kills so many people.

Karen Keener

If by “fixing the system,” you mean elevating those people as role models, you are just as misguided. If by “fixing the system,” you mean voting, again, misguided. If by “fixing the system,” you mean suing or making the problem well known, again, misguided. If you mean throwing money at the downtrodden... sheesh. What does it take to realize that elevating victims to model for the rest of us the supremacy and legitimacy of victimhood doesn’t fix anything? Subsidization of problems clearly creates more problems. Individuals are downtrodden, but certainly, more government has never been the answer. Government is the quintessential trodder. I absolutely have a problem with the system.

You use the name “Erin Brochovic.” That’s kind of ironic to me. Last I heard, the people of Flint still don’t have great water. More importantly, they don’t trust the water. They are learning, though. All that press, all that attention in the mainstream, all the money thrown at the victims who will be sick for life using every last dime of compensation to pay for their medical bills, and yet, the best people can do, and I mean this literally as someone living with really bad water, is to filter every drop of their own water. People have to put their trust in themselves.

We (my family) rent our home, so putting a whole house water filter here is impossible and expensive. Should I wait until we get really sick and then sue to be taken care of with loads of money just to cover our medical bills? Is that the answer? Do I hold up signs to wake my processed food and sugar obsessed neighbors to the fact that their water supply is tainted which is the least of their health condition causes? Or, do I prioritize (as I have) getting a water filter for cooking, using distilled for drinking, putting the best half-ass filters I can find on our showers and hoping that's enough knowing that some of the bathing will still be toxic- but maybe, not too bad?

Personally, I think my answer is better in the long and the short run. In addition to filtration, we eat and treat our bodies with the awareness that toxic pollution is unavoidably around us on planet earth in modern times. We use regular detoxification protocols and eat as clean of sourced food as we can afford. We recognize the burden of cost for these choices to prevent serious illness.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Health problems will create financial problems. Financial problems engender more health problems. I could go problem by problem to show you that the system is already “fixed.” The solutions are ones that must be done individually based on a radical change of priorities.

I think, too, of the air quality issues where I live. I know the local CDC has been caught lying to cover up the local environmental repercussions of bad air quality. They also reduced the local standards. With local industries in control of the state, I don't expect them to make changes until their employees organize against their own company to fix it. For now, most in my region are content to live in the lie perpetuated by the culture. They don’t want to risk going against their employers or even thinking they have any personal power to change things directly. They would much rather vote and look to the government (who happens to be owned and operated by their employers) to intervene on their behalf *should that government ever get around to telling them the truth about how its owners and operators have been poisoning their air.* Will the government test the waters (or air)?

Holding your breath isn't the answer.

If solutions need to be enacted on a larger scale, make sure people understand to place their crowd sourced money toward individual answers and whatever power or freedom they may be given within the fixed system must be used to liberate, extricate and unburden themselves from it. We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

If you can donate or drum up donations, I would hope you’d use it for direct help, individual prevention using reason and knowledge to find those solutions outside the fixed system. Using more money, attention and energy to try to fix a rigged system is a waste of effort and resources that could have gone directly to solving the problem. In the case of Erin Brochovic, how many of the people who won compensation spent their money moving or putting whole house water filters on their property? Just curious? How many new families moved into their properties and were using the same crappy water, pipes, etc. for decades before having their own health challenges and learning the hard way to put themselves first?

The thing is, we, humans only get one body. If we prioritize iphones, toys, clothes, cars, money, jobs or anything else (*cough cough* system maintenance) over our own health, we are laying the groundwork for destruction. If, as individuals, we value outsourcing the care of our food, air and water so we can focus on ladder climbing or really anything else but our own health, knowledge and liberation, we are doing ourselves a grave disservice.

To every one of those people like myself, I say, “don't trust the system, trust yourself.” Only you can create the world you want to live in, and you have to start with your little world, yourself and your family. You won't get anywhere if those around you, in your village are happy to wallow in their problems and their victimhood and stay deaf to their own health issues and the serious consequences of abdication of knowledge and wellbeing to a system until it’s way too late.

As long as our culture values victimhood, outsourcing personal responsibility and abdication of knowledge, we are not making any progress. This culture created the dependency on a fixed system. If we don’t shift our values, we can’t shift the culture, and we can’t release the public’s desperate grip of dependency on this broken system.

I think we have to look to what is in our hearts and more importantly, what we place in our minds. We have to care about our values if we ever hope to build a society with a culture focused on freedom, health, wealth and safety. If you care about liberation and freedom from oppression, your focus shouldn’t be on making more likeable oppressors or struggling and bending over backwards to change the minds of the mighty oppressors on high who are incentivized to not regard your thoughts. Just remind the people that they are stronger and more capable without a boot on their neck. A softer soled boot is never the answer. What you resist persists.

The people around you may act like zombies, walking through life without thinking. They just repeat parroted tropes of so-called altruism about how exerting oneself in the service and upkeep of the system is the answer. It’s a system by and for zombies. It’s a perfect metaphor that they eat brains and destroy intellect to multiply their own hoard of broken bodies walking aimlessly in a self-perpetuated pattern of further destruction.

This was my greatest epiphany as an anarchist or self-owned person. My mind was free to make better choices and invent better solutions when it wasn’t taxed with the constipated hope in third party intervention. Learning how to fix the system to save the world is a retarded focus.

The investment has to be made in directly solving the problem. If the investment of everyone is made on a system to deliver a solution, for all we know, the solution may never happen. The system gets shinier. The people in the system make millions. The taxes go up. The people keep paying and being absorbed with the system without ever helping those in need. All this greater energy on the system is at a cost, and it’s never to the rich. Even if it were, the rich may not be directly nor indirectly the cause of the problem, and the system itself with anyone’s money (or everyone’s) may never solve the problem.

“Free your mind, and the rest will follow” ~En Vogue

“What’s in your head? Zombie, eh, eh, eh?” ~The Cranberries

It may not appear that the problems one has are all in our heads. This may even sound demeaning. I can guarantee you that all the solutions exist there. Until, one is willing to recognize this simple fact, a recognition that must happen between every individual’s ears, the problems will continue as unabated as they have been, perhaps getting worse- as they have been.