This was a big surprize to me. It inserted a giant wedge between the world I
saw and the world my parents and many of my friends saw. It also had an alienating effect, felt as a sense of the surreal. It had a profoundly disturbing effect that I was living in an ocean of lies and delusions.
There was a joke, which I forgot how to tell that essentially says that crazy people, think the rest of the world is crazy and not them. Well, imagine being one of those people. Among the many psychological effects was to then begin to wonder why other people believe what they believe, which is
so obviously based on lies.
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Chuck, you are describing what several million people experienced. But in the second quoted paragraph you wander off into the morass.
A friend's bit of light verse:
The goose that laid the golden egg Died looking up its crotch To see what made its sphincter work.
You turned from the fact to trying to see what made your sphincter work. Leave it to the historians. You can spend a lifetime and you won't get any closer to an answer.
Trust the fact. You, I many others had the same perception. King put it nicely in the passage Morgan quotes: if they don't end this war, then they are not honorable. We have to oppose this world of lies.
So the question is how to go about it, not How did this happen to me.
It happened. Get to work.
Carrol