Red Pill Or Blue Pill?

Don´t care, as long as they´re sugarcoated ;)

No, only kidding, of course. I don´t take any pills, not very often, anyway. Not even Aspirine. Bad stuff which can really screw up (or rather: screw through) your stomach. Believe me, I know what I´m blogging about!

I guess life would sometimes be easier if I could bring myself to be a good girl and just swallow the blue pill, but somehow my mind revolts against complete surrender at this point.

Taking the red pill is less comfortable and more of a challenge. We have no idea how deep that rabbit hole is, how deep we are going to fall. And what we are about to discover.

What if we discovered that there really is no spoon? (For ragazzo: Which would, of course, mean, that there also is no dark side of the spoon. Sorry, couldn´t resist it ...!)

Back to earnest. Worse than the spoon-thing, what if we found out that this subtle but persistent feeling, which is constantly nagging us, this sensation that there is something profoundly and absurdly wrong, only we can´t pinpoint it precisely - what if we found out what it actually was?

Morpheus:

Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo:

What truth?

Morpheus:

That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for your self. This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonder land, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I´m offering is the truth, nothing more.

Sounds familiar, but doesn´t sound enticing. Slaves. Born into bondage. A prison we cannot smell or taste or touch. And, just to make sure we are kept from pulling that blindfold off our eyes which would finally enable us to see, and perhaps feel and touch the boundaries of our cells, our medicine is handed to us with a spoonful of sugar, so we are more willing to swallow it. Ah, the blue pill ...Maybe we should stick with it after all. No side effects, just a comfortable easing of the mind´s pain. Numbing, constantly and comfortably.

The red pill, on the other hand, is way cooler. In a way. But it´s also more work. One of it´s uncomfy side effects is that it requires an almost constant work out of the brain. It comes with permanent distrust and questioning of what we are being served: by the media, by politicians, by authorities in general.

It makes us question whether the spoon we believe to see is actually what we´re taking it for. Or if it´s just a big hoax which is part of a bigger scheme (do I sound like a paranoid conspiration theorist here?).

It may even lead us to put entire systems of beliefs and values into question, so we are no longer easily fooled and will no longer accept without questioning our governments´ or authorities´ definitions of what is good and what is evil.

Ready to go for the red pill?

Be warned! Apart from permanently challenging your grey cells, and apart from not letting you believe in such nice things as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Government´s Benevolence, the red pill might get you into serious trouble. And I mean serious. When speaking up publicly in the wrong places, you might end up on a no fly list. It might even get you busted, when you´re associated with the wrong email-lists and happen to have been Googling for the wrong terms. Mind you, this is not only about child protection, as authorities and the media would have us believe (protecting children against abuse is, of course, something I´d fully and unconditionally support). The same thing might happen, of course, when you are blogging about the "wrong" topics.

Yes, you can track down someone who has been looking for, say, a specific company or event. It happened recently in Germany, during the run up to the G8 summit, when the member of a group named "Fels " ("rock") got busted, apparently because his Internet activities (inquiries with search engines among them) had been under surveillance. He was later released without charges, but it is spooky enough that a search for something like a company name or a political event, or a country (done any searches for "Iran" and "uranium" recently?) would make you a "suspect" of sorts.

So what´s your choice?