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PAY ATTENTION ! … and MAKE ATTENTION PAY While the label ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ is often applied to problem children, it could equally apply to those adults blinkered most of the time against anything beyond their personal interests and circumstances. Such people don’t only resist but actually resent any attempt to direct their attention elsewhere or to anything requiring actual thought. But the act of ‘attention’ is central to any study and understanding of psychology, since it determines whether or not we remember anything and governs our ability to make an appropriate response to any and every situation we encounter. So we get inappropriate behaviour whenever people are somehow distracted from those things clearly requiring more attention than anything else. Bored already? Gotcha! Then how would you describe people - including those calling themselves patriotic - who seem oblivious to the following facts? :
So whatever else claims your attention, unless you make your political behaviour accord with the above facts your life as a whole loses any significance and you get just the kind of future you deserve and for which your progeny will hold you in contempt. The act of attention is either voluntary or involuntary, i.e. inner-directed or other-directed. Thus it is the business of renegade politicians and their media accomplices to keep the public’s attention focused on inconsequential matters. Advertisers, salesmen, stage magicians, hypnotists, entertainers and seducers of every stripe adopt exactly the same tactics. Even the habitual joker is chiefly concerned to divert attention from factors he or she would rather pass unnoticed. Just ask yourself this: what proportion of the daily news, media and political comment even mentions let alone addresses any of the facts set out above? So all that you hear from a Tory, Labour or Lib Dem politician is aptly described as the ‘voice of the sheeple’ One is here reminded of a film in which someone is explaining to Bob Hope that zombies were the ‘walking dead’, going around with totally vacant minds and no will of their own. He promptly responded “You mean like Democrats?”. As our own Spike Milligan was wont to say “There’s a lot of it about”. In the course of everyday life, therefore, we do well to keep our wits about us when so many agents of exploitation, public figures, media pundits and so-called ‘celebrities’ are seeking to capture our attention at the expense of far more important matters; making us serve their interests above anyone else’s. But it is not for a moment suggested that we do without the pleasures of entertainment and purely imaginary excursions. We are entitled to enjoy life’s journey at least some of the time. It is only when self-indulgence occupies too much attention that issues absolutely vital to racial and national survival are imperilled. Even a superficial review of history reveals that most great empires died as a result not of external pressures but primarily from inner decay. Indeed, it was their manifest decadence which invited invasion by envious and vengeful outsiders hitherto cowed by a once indomitable empire. We are witnessing much the same phenomenon today in the mass migration of Third World opportunists to Western societies. They don’t have to defeat countries which show no inclination to defend their borders, homeland, culture and material assets. As the late Ronald Reagan observed, a country with undefended borders is not really a country any more. So while people were riveted to their television screens, scrambling up career ladders and crowding the shopping malls, stealthy invaders filled the surrounding streets and foreign agencies were eroding their capacity for self-government and dismantling their very identity. Meanwhile their only engagement with politics has been the personality cults and inconsequential bickering of a pseudo-democracy. Television plus Vallium now comprise the ‘opium of the people’. If you still don’t get the picture, here are some features which artists might include in cartoons epitomising contemporary Britain: Dilapidated townscapes with
And where might you fit into the picture? F Kimbal Johnson November 2006
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