Poison

Poisoning people’s minds makes money. Check the tabloids.

Making money is good. Ask the capitalists.

Poisoning people’s minds is good.

 

One of the greatest evils facing us are organisations that expand and highlight our prejudice in a way that results in our dehumanisation of the other. Media outlets are getting worse and worse, with the very word immigrant now completely tarnished and demonised.

A simple example is this headline grabber.

True toll of mass migration on UK life: Half of Britons suffer…

This is a very clever lie. Read carefully and it says that half of the councils in the country have experienced ‘major impact’ on their services. This DOES NOT mean half of Britons SUFFER because of mass migration. It means that councils have had to deal with extra numbers. To say half have suffered is stupid, because we are not all accessing all the services all the time. Suffered is also a ridiculous word to use here. Waiting an extra day for an appointment is SUFFERING???? Gosh, people, we all need to get out some time.

The article said nothing of the amount of taxes the migrants pay. In fact they NEVER do. I’m yet to see a full fledged article about the amount of tax immigrants pay into the system. A rather inconvenient truth, what?

And there is a constant, constant association with immigration to be associated with illegal immigration. These are two VERY DIFFERENT things. An illegal immigrant has broken the law. An immigrant hasn’t. If Charles breaks the law and Bob doesn’t but they happen to be immigrants what does Bob have to do with Charles? Nothing.

But the tabloids ALWAYS discuss immigration with the terms illegal thrown in.

This is the poisoning of minds. And why? In order sell papers, these guys (and they are mostly men) need to make some emotive statement that’ll make us read that bit of toilet roll. It doesn’t matter if it screws up someone’s life because after all these are the voiceless. They aren’t going to affect one’s job unlike poor sales.

Yes dear media outlets. Hitler and Goebbels didn’t die. They live through you.

The conundrum

This is a great puzzle. What does it mean to be an individual? And why do individuals make up mobs? To be a particular person is a gift. To be in community is a gift. But too often we go the selfish way and join up the nearest mob to make ourselves feel better. Individualism as sold by capitalism is all about self propogation when in reality capitalism is heavily dependent on mass marketing and mob buying.

At the same time in churches we are often sold a story of individual salvation which requires a mob behaviour to sustain itself.

How does Jesus fit into this puzzle? He had many mobs against him. At the same time we see him extricating himself from mob mentality by being different, acting differently and being challenged to be different. (The story of the syro-phonecian woman ). At the same time he’s forging a community that looks after each other. Yet how does this community stop becoming a mob? As it has so often done with disastrous consequences?