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Reminds me of when I was a kid. My dad's mom, who I rarely visited other than for brief trips (his folks were avid dancers and would always show up at OUR hous

Reminds me of when I was a kid. My dad's mom, who I rarely visited other than for brief trips (his folks were avid dancers and would always show up at OUR house on Saturday evenings), watched my sisters and I so that my parents could go to a class reunion. Usually this would fall onto my mom's folks, but they were on some sort of vacation trip. Anyway, my grandmother apparently really enjoyed reading tabloids. I had spent significant amounts of time at my other grandmothers' house reading Ripley's Believe It or Not books from cover to cover, and so I just started doing the same at my other grandmothers' house while eating Violets, a perfumed candy that was apparently popular amongst women at some point in time. Anyway, I thought that everything I was reading was true, including giant ants that were eating corrugated aluminum. I spoke up to my grandfather, asking him whether he had protected his shed against these monstrous incursions, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. It wasn't until my mom saw what I was reading when she returned that she understood what was happening.

noduerme 5y ago
Heheh. When I was a kid in the 80s standing in the checkout aisle I convinced my Mom to buy me a little booklet about "Ancient Aliens". (She usually would let me get a crossword booklet or something, so she didn't really notice what it was). I believed this stuff. Blew my mind. Only aliens could have built those pyramids. Some years later, I found myself listening to a guy named Alex Jones. Believed that the government was going to put us all in concentration camps. Went out and looked at some of the expected FEMA concentration camp sites, took pictures of the barbed wire, stuff like that. Um. I'm not proud of this, I'm just saying I bought into a lot of hooey in my life before I realized that the people selling it were completely full of shit. In fact, every time I did, I felt smarter than everyone else, because I thought I knew something they didn't know. What woke me up to the scam? It wasn't some Dostoevsky mock-execution come-to-Jesus moment. It was a gradual realization that none of these claims made as much sense as other explanations. And a slow but building sense of anger at the assholes who had made all this bullshit up to line their own pockets.

noduerme 5y ago

Heheh. When I was a kid in the 80s standing in the checkout aisle I convinced my Mom to buy me a little booklet about "Ancient Aliens". (She usually would let me get a crossword booklet or something, so she didn't really notice what it was). I believed this stuff. Blew my mind. Only aliens could have built those pyramids. Some years later, I found myself listening to a guy named Alex Jones. Believed that the government was going to put us all in concentration camps. Went out and looked at some of the expected FEMA concentration camp sites, took pictures of the barbed wire, stuff like that. Um. I'm not proud of this, I'm just saying I bought into a lot of hooey in my life before I realized that the people selling it were completely full of shit. In fact, every time I did, I felt smarter than everyone else, because I thought I knew something they didn't know. What woke me up to the scam? It wasn't some Dostoevsky mock-execution come-to-Jesus moment. It was a gradual realization that none of these claims made as much sense as other explanations. And a slow but building sense of anger at the assholes who had made all this bullshit up to line their own pockets.