A Modest Proposal

We live in the time of lies. The Media have taught us that the slide from advertising to propaganda is really just a matter of meaningless words. The Media also demonstrated that a lie, said with conviction and repeated a few times, becomes accepted fact. We, the people, accept that where there is smoke there must be fire. Oh yeah?

And yet we humans are more confused than ever. We drown in the lies from the right and the left, up and down and sideways. Nobody knows what to believe anymore, so we seek refuge in the voices of the people who we think are like us, or pretty, or rich, or... As the financial system that blossomed the first eight years of this century, based as it is on fictions about illusions, greed, and confusion, we don't know who we are any more. Pollsters talk about "demographics" by which they mean slices of the total population that are supposed to think alike, have the same prejudices and preferences.

I have no idea what demography I fit in. Do you? My skin is called white, although it is very visibly red. Not even pink, but bright red. My parents were Dutch, my mother Mennonite, my father racially a Jew, but religiously nothing. I grew up in a very small town in Indonesia. All my friends were shades of brown, from the light beige of boys and girls who had a Chinese forefather or -mother, to dark brown of kids who had ancestors from one of the dozens of "tribes" living in the interior of Sumatra. I was often the only "white," so spent as many hours of sunlight as I could in the sun. I became as brown as my friends. Now I pay for that with about all the skin diseases there are.

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