Vikid was staring into a white page. Fear wrapped around his being, a lack of expression, a loss for words. Writers block.
It was like a nebula of depression had engulfed him. Nothing to say, a grey amorphous cloud… yet inside, he was a shaken up can of coke, bubbling with pent up desperation, a broken ring on the pull-tab, unable to open.
He sat beside the bath tub, guitar in hand and an old tune he forgot found its way through muscle memory onto the woven spiral of half oxidized strings, but the words to the song were missing. It was something about a butterfly opening up, the flower of the heart unfolding. An old Icelandic friend had taught it to him once in what seemed a different era. They had played guitar late into the night when words were freer flowing.
He hummed the tune when his little princess came in, iPad in hand.
“Daddy, can I ask you a question but I need to take a video of you giving the answer. It’s for school.”
He nodded.
She proceeded to ask the question, video rolling as he kept noodling on the instrument. The butterfly groove was now emanating.
The question isn’t important. What was significant was that the query was loaded.
A clever ploy in Miseducation.
Vikid considered what to do. He continued to play his tune and looked into the camera. He could lie to please the school and save the kid some grief of explaining her unconventional father, or he could let her have the wicked truth in all its glory.
Dear reader, you must know what happened next…
He did his best to explain both sides of the problem, aided by the music guiding him.
The question was answered and the video assignment was completed.
The little princess was curious. She said,
“Can we go on the internet to see if what you said is true?”
So Google was fired up and the question was posed.
The articles came in, listed…
Associated Press
CNN
NPR
Washington Post
Politico
CNN
CBS
Reuters
CNN
PBS
Wikipedia
BBC
Associated Press
NYT
Reuters
And on and on. All one sided. All mainstream media. Nothing independent.
The Internet had been scrubbed of the other side of this story. Almost clean to the bone.
Anyone who hadn’t paid attention while the event in question happened (the vast majority) would have no idea about the real story. With adults fooled, what chance did the children have?
Vikid tried DuckDuckGo. Same story.
He was truly lost for words. It was the scrubbing of our memories as a live demonstration.
He stared into the white screen and found some black splotches, the words of an independent writer, ready for publishing.
But who would find them?
And that’s,
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984