time or conspiracy theory?

Sometimes I go off on one. But not in the sense that I go nuts, but my train of thought just wanders off in a weird and uncontrolled direction.

It happened today. I was taking the kids socks off the radiators and pairing up when my mind drifted back to the days where my mum and my grandma would iron everything that didn’t move. This included socks undies hankies tea towels as well as our everyday clothes. You this rarely happens these days and I suddenly thought, is this because we no longer have the time or because we realised we were wasting our time?

I remember grandma donkey stoning the front step!

That got me thinking about time and how people occupied themselves.

I remembered living in China. You would see one man painting a post, another holding the paint pot, another supervising them, and somebody watching him.

Chinese cooking; quick to cook, even quicker to eat, but a huge amount of preparation time.

Then I thought is this all about control?

Governments want to stay in power, in order to do that they need to control the people, and this can take many forms.

You can control their thinking so that they will vote for you.

You can keep them fully occupied so that they don’t have time to think what is wrong or to plot against you.

I wondered, is that what the Chinese government have done over the thousands of years? Encouraged a style of cooking that demands huge amount of personal time. With this style of cooking you know where most people are what they are doing.

In Western countries does the government control our minds by controlling our time but in a different way? How many man-hours spent watching and talking about football? Heavenly people are consumed with a passion for the game? Or any other sport for that matter but football is a good example. Why the vast majority are doing that their minds are not critically assessing the government’s performance, or thinking about what can be done to change it.

And it isn’t just sports. What about TV? I remember when TV started about 5 PM and finished at midnight with the national anthem on just two channels. That gave us all a lot of spare time and the freedom to look around, observe, comment, discuss, and plan.

The government the men working hard and the women fully occupied with such household chores with ironing socks. When people started coming to their senses other distractions were introduced, 24 hour TV, 190 channels, video recorders and now a myriad of variations on catch up TV.

Now that we've all got computers and open access to the Internet and a worldwide knowledge base what have they done? They've introduced Facebook, YouTube and streaming videos so that we use these wonderful machines to numb our minds rather than to use them.

Well I feel better after that, nothing like a good bit of conspiracy theory to wipe the cobwebs from the corners of our minds

Well, lets hope they undo these buckles and let me out of this straight jacket soon, I'm ready for lunch!