Diary of a Young Cynic

It was 1982 and I was standing at the stairwell between classes in college. I looked down the flights of stairs and watched the flow of humanity going up and down. My best friend in college Ken was there with me. We were in a deep philosophical discussion about religion. Over the past months Ken had been asking Christians his favorite question: Why does God let good people suffer? When he asked that question, people would cough and sputter and try to give an answer, but never really could.

I thought about it myself. During my senior year in college I went through phases of praying, going to church, and reading my Bible daily to being an angry rebel. I realized there was no correlation between me being a holy roller or hellion and good or bad things happening to me. It was all random. At the end of my senior year a series of bad things happened to me, despite all my hard praying. I thought God was trying to break my yoke, but I later realized that each bad event had a logical explanation — there was no man in the sky throwing lightening bolts at me.

So, on that spring day in the early 1980s I confirmed what I had suspected for six years — that the whole religion thing was made up. I had been tricked and lied to. I was the victim of a giant practical joke. The only supernatural being that existed is what I could conjure in my head. My epiphany that day was the beginning of a 20-year recovery from religious brainwashing.

Nationalism

In middle school I loved my history and government classes. But I eventually found that the textbooks were slanted. The Great Crusades were not about freeing the Holy Land from Muslims. They were about profiteering, corruption, power, and murder — including murder of not only Muslims, but Jews and other Christians. It was okay to kill the Orthodox Christians because they were different and didn't believe the right way. So, the Crusaders sacked and pillaged their land and cities.

When I was growing up there was a war going on. Two of my classmates lost family members and I remember the look of deep grief on their faces. We were all told that Vietnam was a struggle to contain communism and I believed that lie until I befriended a Vietnam war veteran and he gave me his book to read. His story sparked my curiosity and I begin researching the Vietnam conflict. I learned that the U.S. used a highly questionable Naval confrontation in 1964 as a pretext to expand the war. This act is no better than the Nazis, who staged a fake military intrusion in 1939 to begin World War II.

And secondly, the war wasn't about containing communism. It was a war about colonialism and rich capitalists versus the pheasants. The Viet Cong were not motivated to fight for political ideology, like I was led to believe, but rather they had been promised land. 

Back on our own continent, the United States has meddled in South and Central American politics for over 100 years. We are told that our interventions are to contain Marxism and promote democracy, but often it's to protect the commercial interests of American companies.

In short, the idea that the United States is a noble country that always pursues good is a lie. Our country does have a history of doing good deeds, such as rebuilding Europe after World War II, but our record is far from perfect. When you hear the euphemism of "promoting democracy," it is often a code word for "protecting the commercial interests of companies who have strong influence over Congress." Cuba is a great example of how our lies and meddling badly backfired.

Code Words

When I hear the words "job creation" I know that really means forcing a community to accept a big, dirty factory. The truth is, most production facilities are highly automated, and companies prefer to bring in their own people. In the end, a company expands and makes more money and the community is stuck with the impact, sometimes in the form of poisoned water or air.

As we are seeing right now, the "tax cut for the middle class" was a huge lie. Corporations received a nice tax reduction, but many average citizens are now shocked at seeing their refunds being changed to large amounts owed.

Little Ol' Me

There are different types of cynics, and I am the type who believes that everything is a giant joke. I see working class Americans who vote for a political party that only cares about big companies and the rich, at their expense. I see our country engaging in endless war to benefit large defense contractors. I see Americans tell me they don't WANT socialized medical care even though their insurance companies will fight them for every dime when they make a claim. And so much for the poor bastards who can't afford insurance — they just need to work harder.

After 30 years of pondering this I'm beginning to think that I'm not a cynic after all, it's just that the rest of the world is crazy. People accept and buy into lies way to easily, and the ability to question and analyze appears to be lost by the mainstream public. Whatever baby food we are given by our political leaders, so many people appear to just swallow. Hey, we were completely tricked about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. How many more times must we be tricked before we finally learn?

The Wall

A main theme of my four blogs is to QUESTION EVERYTHING. When we are told that the U.S. is being invaded by sex traffickers, drug dealers, and criminals, what is the extent? Don't Americans create this problem by buying the drugs and prostitutes? And what is the percentage of good and bad people crossing the border? Aren't most of them good families simply trying to find work and a better life? Is climate change causing droughts that are forcing them off their land? Is our constant meddling in Latin America creating unstable political environments that's forcing people to flee? Do our trade agreements favor big agri-business at the expense of the common farmers? I will dare say that we created most of the fucking problems at the border, and now we want to build a steel barrier to keep out the victims of our greed, our lust for drugs and sex, and our insistence on burning fossil fuels. Look in the mirror for once — maybe we Americans are creating our own problems and screwing over the developing world.

So, going back to my early 20s, I have to ask myself the question: Was I really cynical in thinking that life was one big joke, or is maybe life really one big joke?

Photo: Steve Halama