Difficult to remember but think I came back to my dorm room after classes one November night. My roommate, Mike, had the TV on and tuned to the local network affiliate. The Berlin wall was coming down. Something utterly impossible. Something that could not be and would never happen in my lifetime had happened and I was totally stunned. I had no reaction.
I think it was the same way for many people. As odd as it sounds a whole way of life, a mindset, an attitude was suddenly all erased and the wheels of history had gone down a different road. That looming specter of nuclear war that I had pretty much accepted as an inevitability had just vanished in the pop of champagne bottles and fireworks being shot off on top of a wall. What was left?
I think that we all had to come to terms with the “new reality”. Some looked at it in a hopeful light and decided that we could now move forward without all the baggage of the last fifty years weighing us down.
Others not so much.
Maybe with that sort of mindset in place they almost welcomed George Bush when about a year later he popularized the phrase “The New World Order” in a speech concerning the course of history now that the Soviet empire had effectively collapsed.
New World Order wasn’t a new phrase. Conspiracy theorists knew it from the beginning of the 20th century when globalists such as HG Wells, Cecil Rhodes, Elihu Root and Woodrow Wilson advocated for the dissolution of national boundaries and the establishment of a planetary governing body. Globalism became the new nefarious conspiracy to replace international communism.
Previously little known groups such as the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, the Trilateral commission, Bohemian grove, and skull and crossbones suddenly became more and more scrutinized. The innate secretive nature of these groups just fueled speculation to ridiculous levels. Now here we are 25 or so years later and we’ve little to no more information on any of these groups or plots.
Then the 90’s brought a series of disturbing incidents and vaguely defined threats to liberty. Desert Storm, Waco, Ruby Ridge, “clipper chips”. Certainly pop culture fed the hysteria with shows like The X-files. Then along came the mismanaged 2000 election with hints of fraud and shortly after that 9/11.
The general level of distrust, the misgivings, the overall respect for governments, and for international bodies such as the UN has plummeted. The American people are more leery of government and its intentions. Anything and everything can now be a plot against the general population. Even the most innocuous of programs such as health care seem to have an ominous edge to them.
Those in power don’t help things. They seem rather oblivious to the complaints and blindly plunge on.
The general feeling is now that anyone with power or money or both will do what they have to do to maintain or augment that power and money at the expense of others and not just financially but in terms of liberties and individual rights.
What could happen if this type of sentiment is not addressed? Well in the extreme cases when people get shoved too far it could lead to a violent counter-reaction. Just look at what happened in countries in the near east when their governments failed to react in a proper and timely manner to the complaints of the great many. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria are great examples.
At the very least it means that more and more of the population will become disillusioned by the political process and take less of an active role in their governments and leave decisions to a smaller number of people. A sort of twisted self-fulfilling prophecy.
What’s the answer? More rather than less involvement with the government, real and not just promised transparency in government, a more thoughtful approach to governing that is more reactive to the fears of those that aren’t on the leading edge of change.
I don’t think that conspiracy theories will ever go away entirely but I do think that if we make things more transparent and we have a more reactive government that we may minimize the effect on the general population that they have enjoyed in the last quarter century.
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