I was born and raised in Los Angeles. This gave me privilege I never really understood. In fact the area I lived in was special even by special standards. A friend of mine who was raised 20 miles or so north said that he desperately wants to hang in our area. Due to my location in the world I had access to nearly everything, dozens of radio stations, countless great restaurants (a types of food) a dozen TV stations, countless film and live theater venues and the great physical attributes CA had to offer.

But this post is not about the area it is about how I perceived things. I knew certain people and places existed in the world that were not as evolved as my world. But these things were abstract. When I was a 7 my mother said to me “who do you want to invite to your party” and I said, “the kid with the red sweater on” and she was surprised I didn’t say the “black kid.” I saw differences in people but those differences were simply differences in the way they expressed themselves, the idea of some giant social class division was preposterous to me. A British friend once tried to describe the class system that still exists there today and I was lost as this just seemed beyond stupid.

A few months back I drove through a small town where few friends I once had were from. As I drove through the small town I wondered where they got their music from? I had dozens of retail stores, dozens of radio stations to find music but they had none. It struck as I remembered them telling me they bought things from the Sears catalogue at a lot, while had an infinite number of retail stores selling things from all over the world to buy things from. I have never known what it was like to live in a cultural void.

I lived in New Orleans for a while and I noticed that people were different. It seemed to me they had heard there was a pacific ocean but they didn’t know it existed; there is a difference. But I shrugged it off as that was just how they were and most of the folks were fine to me.

For years I’ve heard the rhetoric of politicians on the topic of middle America and the bible belt etc. I chalked all that up to politicians needing to find some way to reduce the people they will fleece to bumper sticker memes. I dismissed all of that silliness, as it seems to me that people were pretending to be ignorant and stupid just to be voted for.

Then this:

I have no way to verify the veracity of this “document.” I found it in the vast wasteland of the Internet. At first glance this test made no sense to me, as the questions were without reason and the answers were even worse. I couldn’t see how the answers were “right” under any circumstances. This examination of intelligence was a foreign language to me, a language I could not understand.

Upon seeing this document I was silenced, yes I was stopped in my tracks. Even through the appalling educational system I went through I was never exposed to anything like this. Even the handful of times something this preposterous was presented to me I laughed it off and dismissed the entire effort. But what if I was limited in my connection to the outside world? What if I had no way of going to the UCLA research library, the Los Angeles Library, or even speaking with people from 50 countries in my area? Right now my the guy who cuts my hair is from Hong Kong, my neighbor is from Australia, my good friend is from France, the guys who moved me recently were from Siberia, and another good friend is from Siberia via displacement from Poland during the war! My gardener is from Mexico City, my best friend growing up was Japanese-American (or Asian/European) and my dog’s breed is from a small Korean island called Jindo. This is my world, for good or ill.

What if this test, and the information leading to it, was all I knew? And what if through the process of this education I was discouraged from seeking anything beyond this? What if someone during this education told me, “Chinese people can’t cut hair?” What if they told me that, “Mexican’s can’t do landscaping?” What if they told me, “people who lived in Siberia were criminals?”

When I grew up I was exposed to theater, film, the ocean, the mountains, every sport available, and every nationality. Concerts came to me. There wasn’t any substantial limitation in my world. Hell, one of my classmates in second grade was gay and it wasn’t worth considering as remotely important. I was a spoiled brat and I didn’t know it. Don’t get me wrong, as it was not about money, we were not rich at all, but more about the geography that gave me access to so much I never saw as special. Look up the great Bob Baker Marionette Studio and know that in the 60’s I went there often. I once saw a replay of the 1972 NBA All Star game and realized I was at that game as child. I have skied and surfed on the same day, Christmas day no less.

This test hit me in a way nothing recently has. What we do to each other is appalling, indescribable on some many levels. It is easy for me to say, “these hicks and their religion” but that isn’t about this. I can see in that test that there will be no inclusion of life beyond the little world that test represents. There will be no “hey, get out there and see the world kid because it is huge.” And most difficult for me to take is the fact that there will be no, “kid, did you know you are Freewill, a timeless being of immense power?”

After leaving Earth I would not know how to begin my report: Well, you’re not going to believe this but it seems that those in charge of “education” deliberately make people ignorant of the whole of the Earth plane, forget about the rest of consciousness and they do this because the few in charge think controlling others is good, or cool, or something. And it gets worse, way worse…

Tags: Ignorance, Culture, Education