this isn't funny anymore

[floatingleaf]

So we're doing another research project at work. This time, my task consists of checking various radio station websites, in order to determine whether they accept online advertising. Apart from giving me a pretty good idea about what kinds of music Americans listen to (country, mostly, it would appear, followed by hip-hop/R&B and a tiny bit of classic pop/rock here and there - so I'm not missing out on much by not listening to the radio, LOL), this project has also made me aware of a disturbingly large number of cultish-sounding Christian broadcasting entities all over the country. As in, flashing ads telling you how to find Jesus and how to see whether you're going to heaven (I wish I was kidding, but I'm not). One website had the following lovely motto: "Smile - God is watching you". It gave me the creepiest feeling of deja vu - Big Brother flashbacks, as it were. You know, from Orwell's 1984. Except this creepy, stalkish, totalitarian ultra-right-wing version of God totally wins in competition with Big Brother. Wanna know why? See, should you fall from grace, Big Brother can only torture you until you die. Stalker!God, on the other hand, can torture you for all eternity. So, point for God. That's about the only difference, imo.

Now, if you know me well enough, you are probably aware that the vicious!sarcasm mode is a sure sign of freaking out about something. So yeah, I might just as well admit that I am freaking out. I might have mentioned this before, but these past few months (years?...) of living in the US made me realize that A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood wasn't just some outlandish futuristic fantasy (naive me - that's what I thought when I first read it years ago). It was a warning. Gilead is coming. It is being shamelessly advertised through the use of most advanced modern technology. More and more people in this country are living in a "high-tech stone age" - to quote an article I read online a few days ago. It's not some sick joke. It's real. And maybe, just maybe, like Viggo's character in Good, I am not taking it seriously enough. Because it's easier to snicker dismissively at one ridiculous indoctrinating website (or five, or twenty) than to really consider the meaning of its existence. Any rabid nonsense becomes dangerous if enough people believe in it. And as long as we still in control of our mental capacities keep dismissing it, there might come a time when there is indeed nothing left to do but smile, because someone WILL be watching. Not God, perhaps, but for all intents and purposes, we won't know the difference.

Just saying.

Comments

[dissonant-dream.livejournal.com]

While I am sorry that this exists, I am glad that you care about it, that it scares you enough for you to put it out somewhere where I will read it and someone else will read it and we will think about it and discuss it with others and maybe then it won't be dismissed or ignored.

It scares me too, the way society could be heading. I don't know what the answer is, but I hope that the fact that we're at least talking about it is something.

*hugs*

[floatingleaf.livejournal.com]

I hope that the fact that we're at least talking about it is something

I hope so too. It's just... I don't know. Such a weird feeling for me. I grew up in a very conservative country, where provincial-style Catholicism seemed the only way to be - and then I moved to a "western" country, which seemed so much more open-minded at first... and then I found out that for a lot of conservative Christians here Catholicism is "too liberal". O_O I am still shell-shocked over that, I think.:/