LOBOTOMIZED

Someone wrote the following:

"There are so few role models allowed by our society. The hope is that we can drop our own differences, and find the similarities in each other."

The author of the two statements above has been successfully lobotomized by the mentality shapers who have taught her/him to employ the jargon and buzz words that s/he did. S/He cannot so much as write two consecutive canards without contradicting herself/himself and realize that s/he has offered a suggestion for there being one role model allowed by our society even as s/he laments the dearth.

As one might expect, the author of the sentences above did not realize that I was decrying the phenomenon, and took what I said as a personal insult despite the fact that I wrote plainly that he had been a victim of social lobotomization.

I responded:

I most certainly did not wish to insult you and am pained that I hurt you.

Indeed, having also grown up in the US, I suffer from exactly the same neurobiological mutilation that all of us who grew up with TV and mass media suffered.

I'll share an anecdote with you so that you will not think that I was insulting you personally and see that I am decrying a ubiquitous phenomenon.

A Polish film maker of some notoriety in his country came to Israel as a new immigrant some years ago. He was interviewed soon after his arrival and was asked why he did not go to Hollywood. He responded: "I did not wish to exchange a political dictatorship for an economic dictatorship."

When I heard the two terms 'economic' and 'dictatorship' juxtaposed for the first time I quite literally saw a brilliant flash of light and experienced profound pleasure as two parts of my brain that had been severed from birth by American propaganda merged for the first time - this despite the fact that I am third-generation Leftist. One of my grand-uncles died volunteering in the Spanish Civil War.

Upon realizing that the facts that I am, as an individual, a fiercely independent thinker; have been a Socialist from my youth; I hail from a family some of the members of which were Leftists from the turn of the 20th C. and I emigrated from the US to Israel for the express purpose of living on kibbutz did not protect me from having US propaganda shape my ability to think, I realized that very, very few were safe from their intrusions.

I was profoundly dismayed and vexed by the fact that until that day I was not able to think the phrase "economic dictatorship". Certainly I understood the concept, but I could not call it by name, could not sum it up in one two-word phrase.

I, for one, cannot accept this state of affairs, cannot accept that my ability to think has been systematically, and frighteningly successfully, tampered with.

I demand the right to think freely, to conceptualize insofar as my innate inability allows me to.

I will not be hobbled this way. I will not accept the fact that I have been brain damaged.

If I decry female genital mutilation, if I decry children being mutilated in order to make them more pitiful-looking beggars, will I not decry the mutilation of children's brains for the sake of making them, us, malleable citizens who behave as the powers that be will us to?

I will.

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com