Magic Glasses- To See What Everybody is Talking About, A Look at Cultural Programming

 They tried explaining it to me-- they even got mad when I couldn't see their view. Well, now-- I can finally see! Here's my new spectacles. 

The man who saw too much 

I decided to start wearing magic glasses, and the decision was based on public opinion: apparently I wasn't able to see what everybody else could see, and while their hearts were all broken over my 'afflicted vision', they apparently were also angry with me, as if I had somehow blinded myself through negligence as they watched helplessly.  

Be Intentionally Upset  

I was told by my trusted social media how upset I should be, and it certainly looked like there was a reason for some concern. There were riots on TV, and while the reason for the riots was never made clear, a burning car usually indicates some kind of problem, certainly for the owner of said car. The rest of us were supposed to be furious-- I realized that-- but I could never see what we were supposed to achieve through such broadcasting of uncertain fury, and everyone was too upset to explain it to me. 

 
The Riots Were MY Fault

 I wondered if something was wrong with me, that I couldn't figure out what was going on, so I asked one of my friends who seemed to have the common arguments and professional riots on the TV a lot, and I was told, in a pretty harsh way, that the riots were in fact at least partly my fault. Since I had no idea what they were talking about, then that was evidence that I didn't care about the mayhem, and that perhaps I didn't care about our future. By not caring, I had allowed this riot to happen, and my negligence was shameful. What was I to do about it?

I made this! 

I Needed SUPERVISION 

Somewhere on TV I'd heard that a society can't manage itself unless the people had some authoritative supervision. I'll have to admit, my vision isn't perfect, but super vision? I definitely agreed, I would probably like that, as long as it's a non-surgical procedure. But where would I get super vision? Was it some kind of special glasses? 

IT WAS MAGIC GLASSES 

$300 bucks. I thought it sounded steep too, but I'd run out of places to look, and there was a guy named See Fore who held a little business on the corner of Assaulte and Battery Streets downtown-- they say he can get "anything". So I parked around the corner and went up to See and said, "Hey, I'mma looking for some super vision glasses I guess with the gold frames?" There happened to be a guy standing right there with See who understood what I needed, and he ran off, and then came back in a minute with a pretty sharp looking set of golden frames. I tried to ask them if my world would change by my wearing the magic glasses, but See said something about how I should go, before I "find out." His friend just nodded, so I took off.

Day One 

I decided not to wear them while I was driving-- the way that See Fore and his buddy were acting, you'd think super vision was illegal, so I'd hidden the glasses in my sock 'til I got home.
I sat down and pulled out the super vision glasses. They probably weren't real gold, but I didn't want to complain yet, the super vision was what I needed. At first I was going to close my eyes, but I wanted to see what happened when I put them on, and when I did, everything became clear. 

Just. Wow. The effects were immediate.

 
The way to make a better world was to force someone else to do it for you! 

At once, it made perfect sense that I should empower a ruthless psychopath to scare the terrible people who wanted me to be brutalized by a ruthless alternative psychopath from now on. It was the most elegant self sustaining feedback-loop imaginable, and I had visions of crabs trying to escape a colossal bucket, bullying and pulling each other back in with their panicked claws, energized by sheer adrenaline and fear forever and ever. 

 

I was seeing things!

I'd been wandering around life, not even knowing that I could inhabit a nice bucket-- I'd actually thought that I could crawl around on the beach, or even scuttle into the water if I felt like it. I'd found the bucket! And everybody was right: if everybody would agree with me, then it would be an excellent bucket, and we could all enjoy the adventure of finding out where these buckets keep going-- we could all go, together. 

 
How rude! How very rude for anyone to disagree, after all. People who don't see things my way were intentionally making things unpleasant for everyone. This demanded action. 

 It's practically my civic duty to make things unpleasant, to show how unpleasant they are making things. 

 
Oh these glasses, they are potent. I can feel a certain power, it's something that seems to come from inside, yet-- I was tapped into a collective idea all of a sudden, an external power reservoir that we all thought we were seeing, and when I think of having that power to make people agree with me, or do as I wish-- and if they don't comply? Of course they would comply! It would be illegal not to! With my own means of force now at my disposal, then the law of the land would be whatever I said it was! 

Headache 

Yeah these glasses, that is great stuff right there in those gold-ish frames. I've got that warm homey feeling of having a caring mother who will take care of all of my needs, while also having a strong father figure, fully-armed-- who can protect me and provide the security of money and the power that comes with it by proxy.  

So many people need governing, but mostly, the people that we empower to govern us--it's convenient that they take care of everything! Bills and laundry, all that dull grown-up stuff. A big family, is what it's like. It's like having millions of brothers and sisters, and some of them run and tattle to Mother .gov if you look at them wrong or don't do as they say, while others try to impress Father .gov in hopes of inheriting the family business, working shrewdly and relentlessly and thanklessly and greedily clutching at the scraps that they are tossed for their efforts. Both can blame either parent for any discomfort, thereby taking no responsibility for their own careless actions ever. Keen!

With no need to be responsible, then any wrong actions by any child can always be blamed on a government, or 'parent', and eventually even the idea and meaning of right and wrong can be delegated to someone else, while the tattling and the bullying and constant blame becomes the foundation of the bratty relationship between the noisiest, most abrasive kids in the family, and it starts looking like they are never going to move out and get their own places, or whatever it is people do when they realize that they've become spoiled little tyrants who don't know that their imagined governmental parents are insane, or that their supposed parents were but a fabrication of their own laziness or shortness of thought, and that they are the ones who must be insane, or just grossly immature. 

The glasses were giving me a headache, I had to take them off.

 They Live?

 Without the glasses on my head, I could clearly see an entity that was animated by a collective belief-- it fed off of the emotions generated by this fake family unit, and was absolutely promoted by six tentacles, the big media outlets, working in unison to perpetuate the funneling of polarized human energy into a single device. In the vision, it wasn't clear what the device was for, but the result was simply a bunch of real people fighting and arguing with each other endlessly. 

These glasses were astonishing. I heard my neighbor outside, and I went out to show him the glasses, but he wouldn't even try them on. We almost got in a fight about it, and I was reminded of the movie 'They Live'. It's a John Carpenter film, wherein a guy finds some sunglasses that allow him to see through a vast illusion-- he can suddenly see the mass mind-control at work, and every bit of printed media and TV is part of the ploy. 

These glasses were really kind of the exact opposite of the sunglasses in that movie, they create delusions instead of dispelling them. And mine were just a placebo, I think I imagined the whole thing with mind power. I paid $300 bucks for them, so I hypnotized myself to maximize value. 

I've seen things now, things that are unbelievable. There is the possibility that lots of people are wearing contact lenses that cause such delusion as I experienced, but why would anyone intentionally wear something like that? I know I did, but still. Or maybe everybody else took the warped lenses off too? It has been quieter lately.

 I decided to look at the glasses with some more discernment, because three hundred dollars. I finally noticed there's no glass in the frames, and they're just cheap plastic. Pretty sure old See Fore's friend ripped me off.

 

 Sir, your glasses have no lenses. See what I'm saying?

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a fictional tale, based on actual events.

all images by me @therealpaul

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