(2005)
“You’re traveling through another dimension…a journey into a wondrous land of imagination…it is an area which we call…the Twilight Zone.” [Isn’t that sweet? Cultural reference only old fogies will understand.]
There is a feeling you get when reality goes weird–-I’ve grown accustomed to it these days. You think you may be dreaming, but things aren’t exactly bizarre enough for that. Still, eeriness surrounds you…you figure things must be normal but you’ve just gone wrong somewhere in your thinking. Soon, you reason, it will all come out and you’ll see where the error occurred and everything will settle down to normal again. But for the time being, you’re trapped in a warped moment of timelessness where you think all the world’s gone mad. I’m reminded of the scene in Mars Attacks when the Martians are chasing the humans and obliterating them with their ray guns as they call out, “Don’t run, we are your friends!” Sad to say, instead of that wonderful reality settling in, the frequent outcome lately is my acceptance that, yes, indeed, we are living in the Twilight Zone. Americans have gone mad.
Christians gather on the beach at sunrise to sing praises of welcome to the Son, just as the pagans they ruthlessly censored or slaughtered did before them to welcome back the Sun. [This has been going on for ages, so it’s hardly relevant.]
Protestors outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice rant about the injustice of removing the poor woman’s feeding tube, claiming her life should be left in God’s hands. (Seriously, do they not see the disconnect in those two positions?) [Since when have humans of average intellignece been able to detect their own cognitive dissonance when they’re after a cause?]
President Bush said, of Schiavo’s case, we should “err on the side of life,” but mocked the pleas of Carla Faye Tucker before his state of Texas executed her. [He’s a politician, what do you expect?] He signed the Advance Directives Act into law in that state in 1999 permitting hospitals to end life-support on patients whose chances of recovery were nil or whose family could not pay for care. (Let’s not even mention Iraq.)
Those of us who gathered at Melbourne City Hall on Inauguration Day to protest the erosion of our rights were videotaped by the police. They got close-ups of all of us and put the organizers on a “persons of interest” list. Did I mention we were protesting the loss of our rights?
Is it any wonder I snapped unnecessarily at the poor parent volunteer who recently claimed our family owed money (failure to pay resulting in the withholding of my son’s final grades) for marching band uniform rental, cleaning of said uniform, and transportation of my son to and from football games last fall? Hello! My son’s not in the marching band. I just figured it was another Twilight Zone moment and let him have it. Poor man. In that case, blissful reality did finally set in when the mistake was finally dug out of our squabbling. [And he no doubt came away from the encounter thinking, “Wow, that atheist bitch is a real bitch.”]
But the unfortunate truth is that, in the big, wide world where it matters, reality is the Zone.
The Constitution Restoration Act is meant to rewrite us into a theocracy.
Protesting is unpatriotic. Screaming critics into silence is the American way.
Lying and name-calling is now reasoned news commentary; doing same regarding a lack of journalistic integrity among your peers gets you extra brownie points.
The party of small government involves itself in any area of our lives where they think they’ll get the votes of the “religious right” minority.
The party of the little guy finds integrity in fashioning itself more like the party in power.
We’ve gone off the deep end. We’re completely lost. It’s time to admit that the wacky religious have been right all along: There really is another realm that we can neither study nor fathom. It’s the Twilight Zone and I can feel it sucking us all in. When they finally get taken up and their clothes are Left Behind, maybe then it’ll all make sense.
Relevant article:
ACLU Demands that Florida Police Turn Over ‘Spy Files’ on Local Protesters