The Cult of Denial

There is a club with an enormous membership, and relatively little qualification to join. It is the Cult of Denial. The denial of what? The denial of EVERYTHING that is outside of the narrow belief's of the mainstream. I knew it existed - it always had. My trip to Georgia and Florida brought it into an undeniable reality for me; I could no longer deny its real strength.

OK - I live in the Northeastern US. I grew up in rural Northwestern Pennsylvania. I don't want to make this a North VS South post. The Cult has a strong foothold in all of America. I now live in Western New York, and people always assume I live near New York City. Even people in my own state, the Eastern part that is, are baffled to realize that there is civilization beyond Albany, and I think sometimes they think Western New Yorkers still all live in log cabins and trade with the Indians. When I tell them I live closer to Fort Wayne Indiana, Kalamazoo Michigan, and Charleston West Virginia than to New York City, I get reactions of disbelief. Most boys in my school, as kids, hunted and fished and were obsessed with anything motorized. I was no exception.

I was always obsessed with the paranormal. There were few books or magazines on anything fringe, especially UFOs, in the early 70s. So what I found I read. The little pocket books of Unusual Tales of the Strange and Unbelievable were great. They were a mix of real accounts and local legends sometimes. That was OK. I remember one UFO comic book from the late 60s, I think, that had true story of 2 boys who saw aliens and were so frightened their hair turned white. For some reason my brother and I both remember how that story struck terror into our hearts and we wondered if the same fate might befall us should we run across aliens in the middle of the woods.

That never happened...thank God...and decades later the information available is not only much more objective but the quantity and quality of UFO books, magazines, and Internet databases and testimonials point to the undeniable fact that it is not all just imagination, well undeniable if a person does even the tiniest amount of research. I do mean a tiny amount.

I do run into lots of people who laugh at the very mention of UFOs. I am OK with that now. Where I used to bite my lip when the subject came up for fear of the almost inevitable response, I now usually speak up. The "almost inevitable" response was most always in the form of an instant visual image of me flashed in the other people's eyes. You can tell from the looks and comments you usually get. I think the picture of me was something like this: A stupid Hillbilly who never graduated 5th grade, never recovered from the Scopes Monkey trial, can't count past 20 without taking off his socks, and in general has zero understanding of any scientific "fact" after 1700. Because, as most people know...UFOs are not real - PERIOD! Anyone who believes in them, or even entertains a thought they are not hallucinations of a hick who drank too much moonshine, is a kook...or a hillbilly....usually both - end of discussion. 

I am sure most of you have heard the phrases - no hard evidence...little green men...Whitehouse lawn...impossible to get here from there...etc. And, let's not forget the easy explanations for all of them - swamp gas...Venus...meteors...flocks of geese...common aircraft...etc. You can't argue with complete denial, short of producing a 1 mile long UFO and hovering it silently over their heads....no wait, remember the Phoenix lights? Even that isn't enough. It is not even enough to make most cult members hesitate. Ridicule of course being their most effective weapon to stop the enemy - to kill the messenger.

I was amazed at, not the number in the cult in the South, but the unwavering lockstep acceptance of the big package of denial beliefs -The denial Handbook, if you will, like Mao's Little Red Book. It is rote memory though, I don't think there is an actual handbook...hmmm. Or IS there? If so my copy got lost in the mail. Some verses might read like this: 

Global Warming / Climate Change- all lies meant to hurt the working mans ability to make a decent living. 

Corporate Greed - Made up by the intellectual Ivy League elite.

Science - it has all the answers and if it can't be measured by whatever equipment exists at the time it just plain cannot exist. 

Government - they don't keep secrets from the public, but if they do it is only to help kill bad guys. Plus if they do keep secrets it is for our own good so be a good patriot and shut up.

The Economy- The main purpose of government is to aide the economy. The main purpose in life is making a living. The Economy is fine...everything will be fine...if only the Government would get off the back of Big Business, which after all only has the working man's best interest at heart.( see definition of global warming above)

Spirituality and God - can be of some use in earning a living/ keeping order, but don't quit your day job to pursue either. Rules about how everyone should act are good; otherwise how anyone would know if their neighbors were breaking the rules and needed to be punished.

UFOs - Can't possibly be real or The Government (see above) would have told us. THE END.

The Free Press - If any of the above facts were not true it would be on the nightly news. Everybody knows that.

All those things just can't be argued with. Am I being judgmental? Somewhat, yes. I have seen a big change over the past 20 years. I thought the tide was turning, that we as a national/world were reaching critical mass, which would expose the Cult of Denial and thereby render it harmless and useless. 

Now after my trip to the South...I think it could be a lot further off than I had thought, and hoped. I have quite a few friends in the North who think exactly the same. They are folks who would drop anything and run to help you if you needed it. In fact, one of my best friends from high school was the person I went on my trip south with. We work on auto repair and construction projects for each other. I can take a pile of lumber and turn it into a piece of furniture or a house, and he can take a car which I would want to take a sledge to in frustration, and make it run smooth as silk. Our work ethic is the same. The way we view the world is not the same He believes the US should kill all the Arabs....problem solved. His IQ is higher than mine. He has read far more than do me, but not about the kind of things you might run into on Dreamland. 

He was giving me a synopsis of one fantasy book where the creatures in it could move through time at will...past present or future. He thought that concept was fascinating. So, I told him about the REAL US Military remote viewing program and how they found past and future were all just as easy to remote view as the present. Guess the response.

So we may be closer to awakening as a species...just not as close as I had tried to optimistically convince myself we were. My feelings in such interactions with Cult members are complex. It is usually not anger. Can you get mad at a person who fell into the most well disguised trap? It is not superiority, again, it is such an expertly planned trap it has trapped the best of us at times. The main emotion is usually sadness. Sadness that the sole purpose of the Cult is to keep people from knowing themselves, what they really are – or can become. It keeps them from God. Another emotion may be an odd form of gratitude, being grateful that some of us have escaped or wiggled free, or had the door wedged ajar by people like the Dreamland Gnostics. It is a gratitude which is squeezed thin, at times, by the weight of the knowledge that humanity is so expertly and subtly controlled. Exploring the Unknown Country it a little like eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Goodness and Evil? The difference being that this time instead of being forced from the Garden of Eden, we are welcomed back home.