Conspiracy Theories.

Last night we went to hear the Architects and Engineers talk about the truth of what happened on 9/11. We were interested in seeing a bunch of organized conspiracy theorists talk about a conspiracy....and where else to go than Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC? Afterwards we came back here and listened to the Andrew Bird CD that Jenny brought me (the link is to his NPR sites, where I first heard of him. He gave a stellar interview there...) and talked about these conspiracies...and even though I've never smoked anything in my life, it felt like I should have been last night.

As I was sitting in the room with 100+ people listening to a presentation on how the government blew up the World Trade Centers I thought about how what I was doing was a privilege of the wealthy. And as they urged us to give money to their cause, forgive me, but the only thing I could think about was whether or not there were way better things to give my wealthy money to. The thing is, I bet there have never been conspiracy theory meetings in most countries that actually have conspiracies happening in them...and instead of getting together to discuss whether or not the United States Government killed some people in 9/11 why not get together and talk about how governments are killing people systematically in genocides elsewhere...or perhaps how Presidents steal elections and money from their citizens every day...those are some real live conspiracy theories...

The thing is that they didn't even tell us why this was necessarily important. If the government blew up the trade centers and orchestrated the whole thing in order to go to war, then let's protest the wars that emerged from the wreckage, rather than protest to get the government to launch a more thorough investigation into what really happened. (Besides...they went through an awful lot of trouble to link the catastrophe to Afghanistan when we actually went after Iraq in the end...if they did it, why not just link it to Iraq in the first place?). Instead it was a massive group of men and women who already believed in the conspiracy sitting around laughing about how the government was so inefficient and managed to set up the destruction of two (I mean three!) very important buildings without anyone knowing or leaving any concrete proof (haha!). But how they are both incredily ineffiecient and masterminds of a grand conspiracy continues to baffle me...

As I fought the urge to ask the man if he was paid by the Obama Administration to spread rumors to make people hate President Bush (just to get a reaction, of course...) I did briefly think about how judgemental I was being of this room of people; but mostly I realized how sad it made me...we have all this wealth and a relatively well-functioning government...and what we do with that is discuss how the government (which has never even come close to enacting violence against its own citizens...only those of different nationalities...) is wreaking massive destruction on its own people. And I decided if these people really wanted a conspiracy theory against its government maybe it should become citizens of Darfur or Zimbabwe (and numerous other countries).

All in all, I decided that I would much rather go downtown and sit with Reverend Mary and listen to her talk about how the Queen of England is financing the international drug trade through Epiphany Episcopal Church, or how the government has it out for the homeless because they categorize them as mentally ill or drug addicted...besides, those are more likely to be true...