Mom has an 8th grader celebrating a quaint rite of passage to high school. She’s AT the school. But sorry kid, politics comes first.
In the 1920s, Vladimir Lenin had specific uses for both propaganda and agitation in his control of what the public believed and knew. One shaped public opinion and twisted facts, the other would harness emotions like outrage to compel the crowds into particular actions. Agitprop became the Soviet term for the coordinated use of both.
The USSR may have been dropped into the dustbin of history, but their legacy of population control lives on. Why else would all these ‘grassroots’ protests have the mass-produced signs ready and waiting in a Uhaul before a march, or everyone conveniently waving the same pristine flags, or wearing the same t-shirts?
Only to turn around the next week (often the same people) to loudly protest a seemingly unrelated issue?
People get whipped up into a kind of paranoia and they start to act in odd ways.
This Portland mom for example, is missing out on her kid’s 8th grade graduation ceremony. (Let’s leave aside for now the question of whether celebrating all the small things diminishes the larger achievements.)
Nothing would be so good for this woman’s mental health as to turn off her phone, her computer, and wherever it is she’s going for her news feeding for a good three weeks, and take her kid out of the concrete jungle and wander around in nature for a bit.
Having seen the disastrous choices some of these ladies have made (like the woman who faces federal charges after tailing an ICE agent, and punching a cop thinking he was ICE) touching grass could do more than change her life. It might even save it.
