By Rosemary Bredeson
March 2, 2012

This is the moment where we Americans have a choice to make.  This is not about politics or elections or government.  This is a fundamental choice about the kind of country we want to be in the 21st Century.

Are we willing to suspend logic and reason and mathematics and science so that we can adhere to beliefs based on other sources of information?  Can we afford to disparage those who obtain education as ‘elitists’ and ‘snobs’ while upholding the value of avoiding questions and accepting whatever is being said by a pundit?  Are we choosing now to ignore the development of understanding and the evolution of human consciousness so that we can regress to a period of time in Earth’s history where the advances were not yet accepted?

Nicolaus Copernicus was a true Renaissance man.  He was a mathematician, physician, Catholic cleric, linguist as well as an astronomer.  He proposed the theory that the Sun was the center of the Solar System and that the Earth orbited around the Sun, not the other way around.  It appears he was afraid to broadly publish his observations and theories because he feared repercussions from the establishment, especially the religious establishment.  His treatise was published after he died and did, indeed, meet criticism by those who, in the mid 16th Century, declared the science invalid because it contradicted the Bible.

When Galileo Galilei used a telescope to observe the motion of the planets he supported Copernicus’ theories.  For that heresy he spent the final years of his life under arrest.

We are now at a crossroads in America where the fundamental question is not one of politics but one of deciding what is the basis for the decisions that we are making about our country and how it operates in the 21st Century.  No longer can we sit silently by and allow reason and logic and mathematics and science to be ignored or denied because of one small group’s religious beliefs.

There are three kinds of human beings in America today.  The first are the ‘sheeple’ who are being led to their eventual demise by what I call the ‘brilliant brainwashers’ – those who tell lies over and over again while convincing listeners that everyone else should be ignored because it is the others who are lying.  Brilliant hypnotic technique – set up the situation that asking a question denies you the right to belong to the ‘group’ of insiders who know the ‘truth’ as told to them by the ‘brilliant brainwashers.’

Then there are the ‘sleeple,’  those who are living their lives in an unconscious state, not asking the relevant questions but living in a state where they might still wake up and ask those questions, intellectually curious about the answers and willing to grow in awareness.  There was great hope that many in this category would wake up during the fabled year 2012.  [update: 2/2014 – there is still hope.]  They must choose whether to be sheeple or awakened people.

The third group are the ‘awakened people’ – those who are conscious and aware and intellectually curious.  They ask questions.  They ponder the answers.  They are interested in pursuing truth and reality and use the vast resources available to them in the 21stCentury to discover more information about a situation.  They are unwilling to take one source as the only valid source and they triangulate information they receive by checking multiple sources.  These are the hope for the future of America.

I think the politics of America in these days is serving as the catalyst for many of the ‘sleeple’ to wake up.  When illogic and the forcing of a religious view that differs from one’s own become the standard of the day then the sleeple are starting to rouse and to ask, ‘What’s going on here?’  It’s as if Rip Van Winkle is looking around and saying, ‘This doesn’t look like the place I went to sleep in.’

When an anti-woman agenda is proudly waved as the flag of conservatism then every woman starts to wake up and ask if this is the country she wants to live in.  When politicians designate making insurance companies cover medical expenses prescribed by a doctor as ‘intrusive’ and, at the same time, say that forcing a patient [a woman] to undergo a medically unnecessary procedure that neither the doctor nor the patient agree to AND that includes an invasion of that woman’s body as the government’s purview but not ‘intrusive,’ then we have lost the compass of rationality and logic in our country.

The party that speaks of itself as ‘the party of small government’ believes that the government has the right to invade the relationship between a woman and her doctor and, indeed, invade the woman’s body over the objection of the woman and her doctor.   This is NOT small government!  It defies logic that someone can say both things and can believe that they are reasonable at the same time.

At this point, I must admit that I am trained as a mathematician.  My technical career included working for the Department of Defense and for NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope Project.  I am biased in favor of logic, rationality, reason and science.  And it pains me to see so many people believing the stories, the lies, that they are being fed without questioning the logic of what they are being told.

If A and B are true, then C cannot be true.  If a small government means that the government should stay out of a person’s private life and the government has the right to force a woman to undergo an invasive procedure that she and her doctor do not approve, then there is no logic to be found in holding the two positions at the same time.  If A and B are true, then C cannot be reasonable, in this case.

The ‘sleeple’ are waking up.  The Occupy Movement showed us that the 99% are starting to rouse and are asking, ‘Does this make sense?’  Women are starting to ask, ‘What makes you think that it’s okay for you dictate what my doctor and I decide is medically appropriate for me?’

And those who question whether they really want their employer to make the decision about what medical care they may or may not receive are waking up to the reality of the proposed America of the future.

A small group of religious fanatics is trying to force their limited religious views on the vast majority of Americans who are awake and aware.  The sleeple are starting to wake up.

Do we really want the America that the sheeple are trying to force us to have?  Are we willing to live the rest of our lives under arrest by those who would force their religious ideas upon us despite the findings of science and mathematics and logic and medicine?

Be reasonable.  This is America’s Copernicus Moment.  We have far more resources to support our views than Copernicus and Galileo had.  It is acceptable to be a logical person in the 21st Century.  Education assists us in developing the skills of critical thinking.  Apply that skill today and ask yourself if you are being logical.

© 2014 Rosemary Bredeson, all rights reserved.