The conspiracy is a conspiracy!

A friend of mine recently told me with some conviction that it was the American government that had taken out the twin towers on 9/11. The media was in on it, she said, and eyewitnesses had been silenced. My first instinct was to laugh. Well, point and laugh, actually - because what's funnier than someone who believes something different?


I didn't argue with her or ask her reasons. First, because of the steel in her eye, and second, because I don't much care. Sure, I know it matters a lot whether or not the U.S. government faked a terrorist attack and a moon landing, and whether "a secret society of the five wealthiest people known as the Pentavirate run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret mansion in Colorado known as... 'The Meadows' ... (The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Coronel Sanders)." 


But I chose long ago not to get riled up about things I'm not going to work to change. I'm an artist, a storyteller, and a teacher - not a disbander of secret societies.


While I am open to the possibility that the nuttier theories of the world are based on fact, even if the justification for the Middle-Eastern invasion that jacked up the American economy and bloated an already gargantuan military-industrial complex was a crock of bull (which, I hear tell, it was - Imaginary WMDs, anyone?), I still don't feel the need to get upset and chase conspiracy theories around the internet, because the fact is, they're not necessary.

It doesn't take a powerful, string-pulling elite to get humans to agree to ugly, stupid things. All it takes is human nature. Humans are generally selfish, greedy oinkers, who use whatever power and money they have to protect it and get more. We are fear-driven lemmings who - when the chips are down and threats loom large - will believe anything that allows us to look elsewhere for the villain who, most likely, resides squarely within.

Even a pacifist, liberal(ish), pinko-commie, hippie-wannabe such as myself is complicit in some ways in the mindset that allows this country to bomb poor people and maintain the status quo. I drive the roads and reap the benefits of the most glutted, obesely wealthy nation in the history of the world (thrift stores, anyone? woot! woot!).

There's a conspiracy, sure, but it ain't no secret. The conspiracy is us.