1968: A Space Odyssey
We look at the world and think it has always been like this. There was always the media, and always the illusion of knowing what’s going on around the world. There was always a diffused popular culture that made you look somewhere else other than at reality. There was always TV and we didn’t have to talk a lot in between. Well, in fact, these weren’t there once upon a time. What is even worse is to actually believe this is the best you can ever get, without thinking about or considering the actual past. People used to gather around ideas, leaders, and passions; now they gather around TV to voluntarily get their brains washed. Consent is being ‘manufactured’ today, not originally created by individual thinking any more. Our elementary school teacher used to say, when we didn’t study: ‘I cannot open your head and put the information in, you should learn yourself’. Years passed, and today I am convinced that this actually can be done! Since no one cares about reading, the subjective, bended information pills prepared by the mass media is all that we take for granted: directly to the brain.
‘I am drunk, you're beautiful. Tomorrow I’ll be awake, but you’re still gonna be beautiful.’ (From 'The Dreamers’, by Bernardo Bertolucci) Tomorrow we could all be awake, but everything may not be as beautiful.
In the 2004 Academy Award Winning documentary film ‘The Fog of War’, ex-American Secretary of State (1960-1967) Robert McNamara, who has been harshly criticized because of the terror created in Vietnam, says: ‘I do not expect today's people to understand what was going on in the atmosphere of the 1960s’. He is right, we do not. In fact, it is as if those years were never lived, as far as we're concerned. The older ones do not remember it, TV doesn’t mention it, what do they expect, to read it? We’re being programmed only to get through the day. The following day and the previous ones must not be our topics of interest.
‘Now every word is like a knife, But the silence cuts you twice.’

Efe Peker (POLS/IV)