Jul 12, 2024

The Scuppering

Sylvia Shawcross

And so the Puppet Masters smiled.

Now children, it is not difficult. Not difficult at all. There’s this thing called the third option. It always exists. It always has. Even in things you don’t think really have an option such as dying e.g. “We’re all gonna die,” say the sanguinely tedious to explain whatever needs explaining at the time. But of course that is not true.

There are the third options such as cryogenically freezing your head, or implanting your consciousness into a robot, or drinking bat blood during a full moon, or going off to paradise or having legacies that live on as if that is any consolation.

Yeah, we’re all gonna die but do we have to die stupid? Surely we could have learned a few things before our expiry date?

Oh I know it isn’t politically correct to call us all stupid, but stupid is as stupid does and we sure do stupid well sometimes. Even politically incorrect as it is.

We weren’t always this way. I blame the idiots with keyboards who invented the on/off thing with computers and stuff. The bloody binary malarkey. Everything is a 0 or a 1. And soon everybody started thinking in 0s or 1s.

Right or Left. Happy or Sad. Correct or Incorrect. Woke or Neanderthal. Agreeable or Terroristic. Vaxxed or unvaxxed. Pro-immigration. Anti-immigration. Pro-LGBTQSL+ or a racist. Pick your binary. Pick your narrative. Hold on to it with everything you’ve got.

Do not look left right or anywhere else. Just stand your silly ground until you freeze your head for posterity. And when you’re reawakened into the new world somewhere way down the line you’ll still have stupid. Mostly we all would. And how do I know that? Because the puppet masters in this current climate are smiling.

And why you may ask are the puppet masters smiling? Because they’re not stupid like the rest of us. They created the binaries to which we all cling like mussels to a crag with wildly draping seaweed hair drifting in the currents of popular opinion. Like predatory seagulls, they’ve grabbed us by the seaweed and are feeding on our stupidity. It is black and white we know and knowing this we are comforted.

How uncomfortable the unspoken third opinion is. And the puppet masters are smiling because they figured out how to make us do the on/off shuffle with such cunning and deception that they always get their way. Which of course is always divisiveness.

“Oh what the hell is she going on about now,” they say to themselves, wondering if they’ll continue reading or not.

Well… I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll know by the time I get to the end of this if the truth be known. After that bad clam metaphor I probably should. This all came about because I found myself watching a Katy Perry video clip. She was dressed like Rosie the Riveter. Now I don’t know if art imitates life or life imitates art but I sure do know manipulation when I see it.

Who among this generation have any clue who Rosie the Riveter was? Why would a popular singer be dressed like the character invented for women during World War II to inspire them to work for the good of the country while their men went off to war? And why would e.g. The National Gallery in Canada be staging an exhibit called “Outside the lines: Women Artists at war?” Or the MLC Research Centre and Gallery in Toronto be staging an exhibit called “Parallels: Women Representing the Great War in Canada and Newfoundland?” Or the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery be staging an exhibit called “Women at War?” Those are only the few I’ve noticed in passing. Isn’t that all rather coincidental?

Well… I don’t know.

Let’s look at a few other oddball things because meandering all over the place is always fun if not annoying for people accustomed to rigidly scripted introductions and conclusions. Canada is back on the world stage yet again being chastised for not fulfilling their financial obligation to NATO who is fighting the war for freedom and democracy in the Ukraine (if that is what you can believe and good luck with that if you do….) Oh the shame of a country that has fallen behind in their duty!

Meanwhile in the Ukraine, women are being conscripted into serving on the front lines and all other Western democracies are discussing women serving in the military as well as men on a compulsory basis. And the battles begin. The glee of those who have suffered at the hands of the #metoo movement going “Nyah Nyah ne nayh nah,” and women considering pregnancy now as an option they never did consider before. And others soon vibrating to the tune of Rosie the Riveter will want to go to war to save something…women’s rights or democracy or freedom or something.

Yeah, figured it out yet? It is not about whether women go to war. It is about the third option. No war. It is not about whether Canada pays NATO. It is about that third option of not supporting a war. It is not about convincing people that freedom and democracy are on the line. It is about war. And the people who profit from it.

And while I’m at it, it’s not about the immigrants themselves overwhelming countries, it is about who and what wants to stir up the hatred and divisiveness that would inevitably come from such drastic change? That will inevitably lead to support or non support of overseas wars?

Efforts at peace scuppered again. So if you find yourself in an argument about whether women should go to war, or Canada should pay Nato, or immigrants are ruining the country bringing their wars here…Just go in for the kill: NO MORE WAR.

Only the puppet masters want war. Only them. There is no nobility in war. There is blood and suffering and profit. Let’s not try to die stupid this time round.

Oh hell… I’m too tired to go on. Really. I’ve finished raving. Peace. Here. Now.