featured on their pamphlets.^9
“No way, man. I say we’re not taking it far enough!” one of the kids
replied.
“Look, I didn’t vote for Bush, and I don’t agree with the Iraq War, either,
but—”
“It doesn’t matter who you vote for! A vote for anyone is a vote for the
corrupt and oppressive system! You have blood on your hands!”
“Excuse me?”
I didn’t even know how to punch someone, yet I found myself balling my
hands into fists. Who the fuck did this guy think he was?
“By participating in the system, you are perpetuating it,” the kid
continued, “and therefore are complicit in the murder of millions of innocent
civilians around the world. Here, read this.” He shoved a pamphlet at me. I
glanced at it, turned it over.
“That’s fucking stupid,” I said.
Our “discussion” went on like this for another few minutes. Back then, I
didn’t know any better. I still thought stuff like this was about reason and
evidence, not feelings and values. And values cannot be changed through
reason, only through experience.
Eventually, after I had gotten good and pissed off, I decided to leave. As I
started walking off, the kid tried to get me to sign up for a free seminar. “You
need to have an open mind, man,” he said. “The truth is scary.”
I looked back and replied with a Carl Sagan quote I had once read on an
internet forum: “I think your mind is so open your brain fell out!”^10
I felt smart and smug. He, presumably, felt smart and smug. No minds
were changed that day.
We are the most impressionable when things are at their worst.^11 When our
life is falling apart, it signifies that our values have failed us, and we’re
grasping in the dark for new values to replace them. One religion falls and
opens up space for the next. People who lose faith in their spiritual God will
look for a worldly God. People who lose their family will give themselves
away to their race, creed, or nation. People who lose faith in their government
or country will look to extremist ideologies to give them hope.^12
There’s a reason that all the major religions in the world have a history of
sending missionaries to the poorest and most destitute corners of the globe:
starving people will believe anything if it will keep them fed. For your new