I will start this article with an apology to those readers who lack a sense of humor similar to mine, as well as to those lovely big hearted folks who don’t like labeling of any sort (sheep and/or shrew).
Regarding the term “sheep”—I have tried (and am certain I have failed occasionally) to refrain from calling an individual person as “sheep.” It is rather a term I have applied to a group of people with a similar “mindset.” If you feel you fit that mindset, you may, if you wish, call yourself a “sheep.” If you find it offensive, and do not feel you “fit,” then that is fine by me. Do not include yourself in the sheep group.
As for shrews. Well, that’s where the sense of humour comes in. I needed a term other than “those of us on the other side of the divide who believe in freedom and do not believe in the agenda or the power hungry globalists trying to take over the world”…whew…”shrew” is an easier way to get the same point across once the term is defined.
Why shrew? That’s a long story. But it is a term as good as any, and is complimentary to “sheep” as it starts with the same first two letters, and it too is an animal. Turns out shrews can be ferocious, even though very small. So that fits too.
So there you have it. Read this article with these things in mind, as it is full of reference to sheep and shrew.
The fatal error of sheep is not realizing that the people they call “conspiracy theorists” and “science deniers” are not some small fringe group of weirdos and hillbillies as they might imagine. The fact is we are large in number and include many brilliant minds and formidable members in our individual fields of expertise. This is no ragtag band of ne’er do wells.
Although I have no question we are on the RIGHT side of things, I will say that to the people who have to deal with us—that fact is of no real consequence (being right seems to have to affect on them). It seems the sheep love to ignore us, and act as if we don’t exist, regardless of the fact we are right. They can’t be bothered with us; we are only a nuisance to them. That attitude is going to one day bite them really hard in the you know where.
Many sheep have asked me, “How can you be sure you are right and we are wrong?” I have often asked myself the same question. There are many answers, my favorite is simply to say, “we are right because we are right”—which of course is rather flippant. This, however, seems to be a more prudent answer: Shrews are curious and look hard for answers.
Even if the prevailing consensus seems correct, we always seem to want more. We want to actually understand why things are like they are. Maybe we don’t do this with everything we encounter; we certainly do it when facing big sweeping pronouncements and when the powers that be tell us we all have to “do” this or that, like take a vaccine no one has really studied for a virus that no one really knows that much about. We typically go “huh?”
We then dive into it. We go down every rabbit hole we can find. Many of those holes lead to dead ends, but we discover those dead ends for ourselves. We don’t let anyone bar us from access and say, “you don’t want to go down there.” We say, “huh? Why not?” Once we start to feel that our usual sources for information, generally what they call “Main Stream Media,” is not giving us the whole story, we quickly move into some uncharted territory and start digging there. Yes, again, more dead ends but we become accustomed to “dead ends” being par for the course of truly uninhibited discovery.
We create conclusions, assumptions, speculations built on all the information we have gathered, and begin to come up with something we can make a tenable statement of truth about. But it takes a ton of work. And is usually never final, never ironclad. We don’t seem to like things that “appear” ironclad.
Sheep do not do this.
I have not yet met one that does. They often THINK they do, and throw back to me lines they have heard on NPR, or the WP or NYT, or of course the big “authorities” such as the retired Tsar of Science Fauci, POTUS, heads of major hospitals or pharmaceutical companies, et al. They don’t seem to realize their insistence on these sources being accurate is akin to looking to Goebbels to verify the accuracy of a Hitler speech, or referring to Der Stürmer for the truth about Jews. You need, today, to go to a variety of sources before you will come upon an accurate portrayal of social or scientific reality.
Sheep refuse to accept this.
What is odd about this is that we have never been in a culture where the mainstream news is 100% reliable. Sources have always been biased, and to really get a true picture of something, we have always needed to access several sources.
The problem is that as Americans (or Canadians for that matter) it has been drilled into us that freedom, truth, mom and apple pie are the hallmarks of our American culture. Although most of us have been brought up to believe that, it really never has been the truth. Maybe for a millisecond it was back in 1776, but I doubt it. (The tenets here are true, but being told that these are the hallmarks and intentions of the American or Canadian government is not the truth.)
That doesn’t necessarily mean that this culture has been 100% deprived of any integrity for 200 years (well, right now you might be able to say that) it means we have always been independently responsible for seeing through this wall of subterfuge. Unfortunately I think they finally managed to chop off the chicken’s head. Most people out there seem to have lost the capacity to use their brains.
It didn’t used to take all that much to reveal the boll weevils hiding in the cotton. We had competing newspapers that reveled in revealing untruths in a competitor’s pages. This tended to work well with all but the biggest players (Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, etc.), now it doesn’t work at all because all the big news sources are bought. This is pretty obvious, but most sheep-types seem to think an owner of a news source has no power over what they print.
Duh.
Many imagine some cigar smoking workaholic editor holding onto his anchor of truth uttering with disgust, “they’re not going to stop ME from printing THAT.” I don’t think that ever really existed. I think if anything kept older news sources more honest than today, it was stumbling onto “truth” as a marketable commodity. This no longer seems to be the case.
So what does this have to do with a sheep fatal error?
Well, just that, truth is no longer a marketable commodity with major news sources, so we must all look to sources where it still is. Sheep don’t realize that shrews have truth on their side. And they align with truth. They also do not believe we have integrity, or that there are quite a few of us, and that we are very SMART, resourceful, and persistent. Eventually that is going to get them, and in a very hard way.
Truth is like rain water on a roof. It will find its way through if there is a way through. Where that analogy fails is when a roof becomes watertight. Culture and human society can never become “truthtight.” Don’t ask me why, it is just a given. Eventually truth finds its way in, no matter what. It may take a while, but truth will get through. It will prevail.
Shrews may not all know all the truth at any given moment, but they look for it, no matter where it might be hiding, and they find it. When they find it, and show other people where it is, they are widening the hole for more of it to come through, just like the leak in the roof, or the hole in the dam.
Eventually the dam will break and the roof will cave in.
