For those of us who are “of a certain age”, we recall hearing about something absurd called “The War of the Worlds”. On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater Company broadcast a live radio show…an update of H.G. Welles’ book of the same name. They announced it for what it was at the beginning of the programming hour. But most people were finishing listening to Edgar Bergen and his ventriloquist act with the dummy, “Charlie McCarthy”. When they switched stations at about 8:12PM, “The War of the Worlds” was heating up and it sounded real to those tuning in. By this time, sound thinking, logical minded people believed we were under attack by Martians. While there was no lasting damage, and no laws were found to be broken, the networks made an agreement with the FCC to be more careful in the future with such programming.
The Philadelphia Experiment of 1943 saw the US Government allegedly trying to make a US battleship go invisible. The conspiracy had the government making a destroyer “teleport” from Philadelphia to Norfolk, VA. It has been officially declared a hoax, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who still believe it happened.
Flash forward to the incident at Roswell in the summer of 1947, not quite a decade later. A farmer found a piece of unidentifiable debris in his field and a whole industry was created surrounding the alleged coverup that followed. To this day, there are people trying to figure out exactly what happened at Area 51 and “where the alien bodies and spacecraft are actually being held.” Are there other intelligent civilizations out there? Could be. But Roswell will never be the same little dusty hole in the wall.
From Atlantis to The Shroud of Turin to who killed JFK, the world has been intrigued, and often times convinced to believe in outrageous conspiracy theories. The age of the Internet is…unfortunately…an excellent breeding ground for these hoaxes. Computer-aided graphics mixed with gullibility breathes life into things that are nothing more than science fiction on crack. Add the fact that we really don’t have to practice critical thinking anymore. Google is right there at everyone’s fingertips. We don’t have to remember or memorize or think. We can just ask. And, there are nefarious players ready to fill your eyes and ears with garbage.
There was a time in the early days of the internet when something like the QAnonCult would have been shredded and revealed as the real fake news that it is. There is something called Occam’s razor. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as “a principle of theory construction or evaluation according to which, other things equal, explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more.” To put it more simply, when Dr. Arroway (played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact) was asked, “Do you know what Occum’s razor is?” She replies, “Yes, it’s the scientific principle that, all things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one.” Brilliant. Deductive Reasoning 101.
So, when Q says that the world is being controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats, I think we can safely say “that’s a load of horse hockey” to quote Col. Potter on MASH. These predictions and convoluted fairytales have hoodwinked an entire segment of the population. Whether you believe it or not is not the point here…although, I do hope you don’t ascribe to such things. What I’m here to tell you about is Gen-Z’s tongue-in-cheek parody of today’s conspiracy theorists. And they’ve called it…
Birds Aren’t Real.
They posit that birds do not exist and that they are all government drone replicas made to spy on Americans. According to a recent article in the New York Times by Taylor Lorentz, hundreds of thousands of young people are joining the fight against what is the REAL fake news by creating their own absurd conspiracy. They KNOW birds are real. They just want people to see how absolutely ridiculous these conspiracy theories have gotten and to put on your thinking caps and use some sense. I think it’s a creative way to fight fire with fire and bring the world back into a place where real truth means something again. To fight against the anger and hate that are tools used by the fearful. And where oligarchs who prey on our fears and manipulate us to destroy ourselves from within are exposed for the charlatans they are. We are better than this. We need more Coke commercials teaching the world to sing. We need more children to be taught critical thinking in school.
I was watching The Voice last week and one of the acts in the top five is a sibling group called Girl Named Tom. As I sat and listened to their tight harmonies, I thought to myself…this! This is from God. This is beauty and this is real. We need more and more and more of this beautiful harmonious music. We need more God…more spirit filled goodness…more nature. We need to take care of our earth home because this is the only one we have. Instead of gazillionaires flying rocket ships of wealthy tourists on a ten minute joyride up in space (and avoiding taxes along the way)…instead of trying to figure out how to live on Mars…maybe they could throw some of that money at the world we already have and try to fix it.
Wouldn’t that be a wonderful Christmas gift to us all?
Peace on Earth…Good Will to ALL people!
❄️
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
John 14:27 ESV