Saturday, December 22, 2007

Why I jumped ship and why you, the conspiracy theorist, should too.

Now, as many on the JREF would know, I'm a former truther.

However, I wasn't as passionate as many of them are, but I was biased towards the conspiracy theory. The attacks of 9/11 happened when I was in grade 10, and while I swallowed the story, the conspiracy theory caught my attention.

Why did it catch my attention? Because it was very simple. The so-called "official theory" was too complicated and too long-winded. It was something that could be talked about for ages but when dumbed down to its essentials, it sounded stupid: 19 men with boxcutters board planes, take out the pilots and crash them into buildings. Very simple, and yet it got past the US Air Force, which was supposed to protect the very airspace that was violated.

Should the US government have been in charge of these attacks, it would have made much more "sense" simply because of how easy those planes got to their targets. What I didn't know as a "truther" was that maintaining the skies is more complicated than it looks, especially when the only "experience" you've had with radar was watching them in movies. With the education of Hollywood, I thought that was the way the world worked.

Sadly, that is the way that truthers see the world: As a Hollywood action movie.

As well, the conspiracies poison the minds of the young and impressionable. When doing a search on 9/11 and government today, 7 out of the 10 top results are for truther websites or "independent media", like Prison Planet (A site that likes to say that they do their research and respect the families of 9/11, but in the same breath say that a government employee sent his son to die on 9/11, as just one example of their "respect"); one is the Wikipedia page on 9/11 conspiracies, and the final two are from a university and the 9/11 commission website. When a young person is doing research on this issue, Google will be the first place that they go to and they will get the impression that this stuff is correct because it is on the first page. In school, I was taught that the first topic that came up when searched was usually the most credible. Young people will be thinking the same thing. Quite sad, isn't it?

I am not sure how to end my first entry here, but I would ask the conspiracy theorists to seriously consider taking off the goggles they use to view this world; as a giant game of chess with a faceless elite that controls our day-to-day actions; and to observe that reality isn't necessarily black and white. I hope that you think about this and realize that the world isn't the way Hollywood portrays it to be and that independence doesn't necessarily equate to credibility.

1 comment:

Vagabond11 said...

Thank you so much for this post. I am just starting college, and over the years of searching on the internet in high school, you can imagine the number of conspiracy theories that I have encountered. Even to this day, 9/11 is still being hotly debated, with people believing that bombs were planted and how it is all some sort of conspiracy to keep the American people asleep so the elite groups can continue their world domination. It confused the hell out of me and Im trying to stop thinking about it, with movies like Zeitgeist, the whole New World Order crap in movies like Network, and so on.