Izzy, sweetie - Look:
I agree with you that over time, the "world" has changed - and sometimes not exactly for the better, depending on what one's value system is and the topic at hand. I happen to also fear some of things going on today, too.
However: the negative is only one side of the story of current events - what about all the great, wonderful, heartwarming things going on? What about the recovery of all the Chilean miners - alive, no less?? If we don't add up those things on our list of "pros-cons" for "the way things are", we don't have a complete picture, do we?
I learned, rather painfully, from the abuse and traumas I experienced as a kid, that NOTHING is ever "all good - all bad". No time in history, no religion, no people or culture, no government - is all good or all bad. Not me - and not even my Nmom. It's all a blender-ized mix of good things and bad things... and in reality, most things are some combination of good & bad together. It is not possible - and leads to dangerous kinds of self-defeating, paranoid thinking - to try to reduce "this thing" or "this person", etc to either just good or bad.
I also learned from my abusive FOO, that this kind of fear is the weapon of choice - the method used by people with real plans to control or dominate - to persuade people not to trust their own good sense; to not ask questions; to just do what they're told; to not see what is right in front of their eyes. To create pawns and foot soldiers in their army of ideas and fear; people who spread these ideas to even more people in some perverse and twisted attempt to do good - to spread the one-sided, fear-based "truth". But I didn't deduce that all on my little 12 yr old's mind's own...
... it was explained to me and made perfectly clear and understandable and simple by some people who lived through the horrors of WWII, in Germany and from other Eastern European countries. From both sides, in the war. For them, this use of fear was the real-life meaning and significance of FDR's phrase:
The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.
Any time I hear a statement that is fear-based and attempts to spread and increase fear - of any one or any thing - I start to question it and the motives of the person/group making the statement. So far, those questions have only revealed that I need to be more afraid of the statement-makers than what they're saying we should be afraid of.
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This is what I was trying to say on your other thread, Iz. But in the process of trying to say it and in an uncontrollable response to what you wrote - I wound up getting triggered into my own fears. Took me a while to work through that and by then, the topics had moved on and I just couldn't try anymore - without risking too much myself - to convince you that you're only seeing half a picture; that there's more to it than this body of rumors, suspicions, fear - that only feed back into itself and eventually blots out the sun.
I can understand & sympathize with why others are offended; these theories dehumanize and objectify the experience of countless individuals and dishonor their "stories"... the real, painful things they lived through - as if it doesn't matter. (Hence the connection with how I got triggered.) I can understand your fear, also, Izz... please don't just give in to it, without questioning it.
I tell you truly - cross my heart and hope to die - that things just aren't really that bad or "like" what the conspiracy theorists are proposing, in reality.
