The Pope. Continued.
Every year when I
return to the States for a visit I am amazed by the amount of television
commercials for anxiety medications and sleep disorders that, “you should talk
to your doctor about.” As these ads
finish a voice-over begins a long list of possible side effects, complications
with drug interactions, strokes, possible organ failures and/or death. The grim possibilities are sped-read
over images of happy, sleeping suburbanites that love dogs, kittens, flower
gardens or children. By the end of
my seven-year online study of that paper I happened upon, assisted by two
computers and two television sets continually covering various, global news
stories that seemed to fit into the plans of sinister governments, media and global
elitists, my doctor asked me if I
ever thought about taking a mild drug to help me sleep and take the edge off a
little.
No, I
hadn’t. But just her gentle
question made me realize how much trouble I was in. I was barely sleeping more than three hours per night and
throughout the day I was in news and conspiracy theory overload. I never connected the dots that what I
was filling my head with had something to do with my sleep problems and stress. I was reading things that I should not
have been reading and what I was saturating my mind with was doing great
violence to my very soul. And now
that I am free from that pit my ears are very sensitive to what I hear people
say who spend too many hours consuming videos of doom and sharing information
in chatrooms on the www.
There are certain
catch phrases and youtube speak that can only be said if a person has read or
watched the same stories I consumed for years. When that person believes with complete certainty that what
they are saying is absolute truth from what they read, saw, heard, or personally
feel, or worse, if they are smug
about what they know, listing videos we should all be viewing and sharing to
deliver us, they are getting sucked into a pit of anxiety and paranoia than can
only be stopped by unplugging the source of the problem......conspiratorial, doomsday
media.
When I went to
the States last summer I sat outside with some of my mom’s neighbors to get
away from daytime television (which is practically one long drug ad now) and drink lemonade. I went outside in the shade and listened to the ebb and flow of conversations that can be
current or possibly from seventy years prior. Some of my mother’s neighbors are in their nineties. One day two of her neighbors used conspiracy
jargon that had been spread around the internet and the others nodded their
heads in agreement.
Which conspiracy you
ask? It’s all a big soup now: most
politicians, definitely the presidents of every multi-national, leaders of most
European countries, every president after J.F.K. and most before him, all
pharmaceutical companies and banks, the military, agriculture, big oil,
medicine, education, media, information, technology, music, art and religion
(definitely religion) are all tainted by and controlled by these nefarious
groups to condition us and eventually enslave us all. I listened carefully to their conversations and comments but never opened my mouth. I just sat wondering where these elderly women had picked up the conspiracy jargon because not one of
these women surf the net as far as I know.
Keep in mind, this
is just one small apartment community of elderly people in a small town in
America and they were fairly up to speed on conspiracy stories.
That’s the power and
influence of this type of media in America now.
A few weeks ago I sat in a restaurant in
Portugal and listened to a man from England talk about his spiritual journey to
become a Shaman. During the
conversation he talked about fluoride in water and water crystals taking shape
or not taking shape in relation to good or bad energy surrounding them. He continued on about his process
toward enlightenment by being buried underground in a casket for sixteen hours into
mother earth and then born again on the winter solstice. Weaved throughout his
spiritual story to me he pulled up videos with his phone to share spiritual, energy
truths along with facts about the economy, medicine, drug companies, toxic
drinking water and the dying off of global religions like Islam, Christianity
and Judaism. Finally he talked
about a global consciousness shift in regards to spirituality. (I’m
not mocking this man, I’m just relaying the points of his conversation to me.) I
said very little but I listened to every word he said. As he spoke I remembered a conversation
I had with a good friend a few years ago.
This was when I was in my apex of: Bible’s end-times scenarios blended
with conspiracy theories and headline news.
For years I had mentally
mixed a salad of prophetic possibilities and global-news-events ingredients into
my head and I dished them out to my friend while we ate sandwiches in his
car. I leaped ominously from one
sentence to another and from one topic to another with no real point being made. In hindsight now, I am sure I sounded
like a river of sound bytes from youtube.
He nodded his head thoughtfully and tried to steer the conversation to
the sandwiches we were eating. My
friend could not get in a word sideways to me. I never took a breath or slowed down and just kept pouring
out possibilities that were likely to happen because they seemed to fit with
events around the world.
That conversation
with my friend happened in August of 2010. On December 6, of 2011 I shut off all media in my life for
about a year. Prior to that day in
December I was in a pit of hopeless fear and in a stranglehold of anxiety that
was isolating me from my family and all reality in my life. I was consumed with the, “what if’s” that
began to take the shape of, “when?”
I actually began to study food storage sites to survive the oncoming end
of the world scenarios. I was full
of anxiety and certain that it was all coming down just as these experts online
had warned us about. My Bible began to be used only as a tool to figure out how
close we were to the end of time and Christ’s return to earth. I misused
God’s word as a prop to argue my points in chat rooms and forgot about the
primary message of the Bible. That
message is: there is an end coming and the whole world will face judgment but
God has made a way to Him and to safety and that way is through His Son,
Jesus. In my process of arguing in
hostile chat rooms about signs of the end I neglected to mention God’s glorious
mercy and kindness.
I also neglected
to model it in my life. Instead, I
read headlines and followed videos dragging myself through my days.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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