Who’s Drinking the Electric Kool Aid?
You don’t need a jungle to hide the truth from people.
In 1978 Jim Jones convinced hundreds of people to follow him into the jungles of Guyana. He then convinced them to commit suicide. More than 900 people drank his cyanide-laced Kool Aid.
In 2012, a different Jones, Alex Jones, choose a different way to poison the people by poisoning the truth. Instead of cyanide-laced Kool Aid he used electronic media. In so doing, he enriched himself on the misery of others. He convinced his followers that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012 that left 28 people dead, mostly children, was a hoax.
Fortunately, the very live and very real parents of those victims took him to court and won. Unfortunately he can’t undo the damage he did to Truth. Sadly, there are those who drank his electronic Kool Aid, who still believe the lies that he said.
Just like Jim Jones and Alex Jones, our world is filled with charismatic people who can convince people that the world is flat and that anyone who disagrees with them is a liar. Instead of a jungle colony or a burning cross in the deep woods, modern hate groups build walls around their militant ignorance with the power of the electronic media.
They can sit home and watch hateful TV channels and share their delusional hate in chat rooms on the internet. They don’t even need to get out of their pajamas to gluttonously feed their hate. They then in turn electronically feed each other , bonding into a odious, spitefully vicious electronic mob that periodically spills out into the real world.
Hitler and Goebbels would be proud of them.
Every society and every generation has it group of ultra-extremist hate groups striving to purify their world of “them”, who ever “them” is. They usually use nationalism or religion to justify their hate and lies. It is always a question of whether a society or nation strong enough to control the hate or weakly let that hate loose into the world.
Which is stronger, the haters or the righteous*?
The battle is continuous and never ending. It is the perpetual fight between good and evil but I do believe that this is true:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and good women to do nothing.”
You don’t need to be a warrior to fight hate, you just need to prevent it from growing further and, like killing a weed, help it to die from the exposure to truth.
Emma Holiday
*I define righteousness not by religious measures but by whether a person or groups act ethically, morally, nobly, honestly and with virtuous intent.
Thank you for reading my work.
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Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.
My writing has three specific goals:
1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.
2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.
3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.
