Lying Our Way into America

In the locker room the other day I overheard a conversation between a woman who looked and sounded to be of Semitic extraction and some other voice who congratulated her. She responded saying that "Yeah, it's a big thing, I had to answer all these questions, like if I was a communisty sympathizer, or had relations with any revolutionary parties and I said, well I'm not a communist myself but I'm not against it and do you remember 1776? So basically, I had to lie to become a citizen of this country, isn't that ironic?" I gathered she had just been naturalized and gone through the ceremony, flexing those mendacious muscles we all have and use when necessary for higher gains.

When I do a Yahoo image search for "lying" what comes up are the myriad maidens in repose, retiring dogs and George W. Bush. I feel partly sorry for the guy, since, really we (well, those 62 million who voted) chose him because he made us feel good, told us what we wanted to hear and now that we don't like what his words have wrought, we're blaming him for being who he is. We didn't want to hear the truth that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, that we are dependent on these countries who foment the very terrorists who attack us, that we supported Bin-Laden and Hussein when it served us, that we are eating up the environment and that we are no safer now than we've ever been, partly because the money pipeline is by-passing homeland security into the Iraqi war.

Had a discussion today about how with democracy comes the responsibility to be informed, to speak out, to vote yet how few of us do. I lie to myself everyday as I get into my mini-van, blaming the car companies for not producing a more efficient vehicle that serves my needs/wants. I don't have, or take, the time to suss out all the details of these many huge issues that affect the details of my life on a daily basis and I know I'm not alone. All this technology that allows us to be informed at any moment in time maybe serves the opposite effect of making us want to tune out because it's all so overwhelming. We parse the news into bits that we can handle and allow ourselves to get distracted by the sensationalist stories, while nations struggle to survive and peoples watch their worlds get destroyed.

Our cognitive dissonance is a wonderful tool, when used for self preservation, but how sad to have to start out one's new life in a country being dishonest about ones beliefs, especially when one of that nation's basic tenets is freedom of speech. Maybe the application process should be simplified and potential citizens asked merely: "Are you for us, or agin' us?" It would save millions in paperwork and processing time freeing up the INS to perform more useful tasks like polishing flagpoles, erecting border fences and profiling lip-gloss toting grandmas.