It is all around you. It is in the newspaper, Facebook ads, magazines, on television, and in the airwaves. At this very moment your mind is being transformed, and your identity is withering away. YOU are being brainwashed.
Brainwashed? What? Isn’t that a word used to describe terrorists, religious fanatics, and the weak minded? However, your mind is weak. Very weak. In fact it has been placed in chains. All that you understand and love about yourself has been stripped away over the years. It’s in the coffee you drink, the clothes you wear, and the car you drive. You own it, and you thrive on it, but you have been deceived. You own nothing, it owns you. You have been lied to by the media and pop culture. You are a victim of a world that wants you to have everything and be everything…everything but happy with the way you are. When individuals are truly satisfied with that they have and the way they look, only then do they become a threat to the cultural beast that wants to feast off your self doubt.
Here are some headlines that I have seen doing fairly routine activities like checking my e-mail, logging into Facebook, and checking out the news. By the way, AOL is paid by sponsors to run “news columns” that are actually ads. I’m sure this is done a ton of places.
1. Make your yellow teeth white!
2. Get ripped in 6 weeks!
3. Lose belly fat by following one simple rule
4. Make $77/hour online!
5. Get rich using this 7 step program.
This list could go on for miles. The media monster is drooling at our lack of fulfillment. We end up finding ourselves looking in the mirror wishing we had a little less pudge, less wrinkles, less grey hair, and better clothing. They will find every little thing you could possibly dislike about your body image, and they will put it under a microscope. It’s the reason we make idols of celebrity beach bodies, and tear them down as soon as they get a little “chubby”.
What do you get in the end? Young girls throwing up in bathrooms, guys using steroids, "fat burning" stimulants, and a generation of people who will never be happy with themselves. Oh, but that only describes people who've gone too far. Really? What about those of us who measure every calorie we eat and burn off, weigh ourselves several times a day, and sigh at the thought of gaining one dress size. We have college gyms stuffed to capacity before spring break, and health spas filled with New Year’s resolutions. To top it off we have covered our fragile broken bodies with layers of clothes that create our identity, and then we jump into expensive cars so that we can drive that identity to work. We have been taught by pop culture how to spend money, to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance, and to flaunt it, if we have it.
If we are happy, then they want us to be unhappy. Our ideas of sex, power, politics, and pleasure have been force fed into our brains. We are told to look at people funny, smirk, and gossip if someone doesn’t quite fit in. We are uncomfortable when others are honest, yet we hide behind our masks.
“They” have us so confused. The cheapest food is the least healthy, and the healthiest food is the most expensive. They make it hard to be healthy, and then you get destroyed for not looking perfect. Perfect like the airbrushed, anorexic, digitally edited models that grace our glamour magazines. In this society you can buy an extra large, 3 topping pizza, with soda, and guess what they give you for FREE? Delicious, fattening, heart clogging, double chocolate, fudge brownies! Can we say Super Size Me?
We are enticed to indulge in everything, but forced to bear the weight of the guilt. They say we “deserve” to treat ourselves to a 1200 calorie ice cream Sunday, as long as we are in hitting the weights the next day so we can conform right back to looking like the cast members from our favorite TV drama. Nobody is immune, and the attacks come from everywhere. When will the madness end? Are we really a bunch of mindless clones? Are we merely puppets who can no longer think for themselves? In this post modern world where the intellectuals pride themselves on being so unique, I find that we are all lemmings following the one in front of us, until we fall off a cliff. Can we be a society that is brave enough to shatter through the masquerade of lies?
The next time you look in the mirror, who will you see?
