Quit Pulling My String

I'm Your Puppet    By Marvin Gaye

 Pull the string and I'll wink at you
I'm your puppet
I'll do funny things if you want me to
I'm your puppet

Oh, I'm yours to have and to hold
Darlin', you've got full control
Of your puppet

When I was a kid, I had a couple of puppets and even a marionette or two.  I was pretty lousy at working them, although the puppets obeyed far more than the marionette, whose strings were untenable to me.  Mostly, I liked the idea of them.  I'd seen and enjoyed their more famous cousins on episodes of "Cap'n Kangaroo" and "Shari Lewis and Lambchop," which is why cheaper versions made their way onto my Christmas lists for a few years.

Now, as a 52-year-old woman, I have a hard time enjoying puppets.  Mostly because I have this sneaking suspicion that a few very powerful people have deemed the rest of us their puppets and they manipulate us seemingly at will.  

How else to explain our love affair with digital distractions?  Or our willingness to draw more than just lines in the sand when we disagree with someone else?  

The cynic in me--that portion of me that used to occupy a space the width of an eyelash but is now carrying some noticeable bulk--is certain that these distractions, these inflammations that ignite the most base of emotions within us are being created and fed to us by very rich people who want to quietly do what they've been doing all along.  Make money and skirt the laws.  I think that the more successful they are at keeping the rest of us distracted, the more likely they are to continue getting what they want. 

I mean, what middle-class person really believes that someone like the Koch brothers have the little guy's best interests at heart?  Surely, it shouldn't be hard to see through their ruse, and yet, millions of us are blinded to it.  How is that possible?  Because we are distracted and manipulated and fed simple, memorable lines about what and who is wrong in our country.

What bothers me most about this mass manipulation is that the rest of us are seen as nothing more than a bunch of simpletons by these powerful, shadowy people.  And why not?  After all,  we are all too willing to accept that title, happily and angrily and blindly tossing about venomous names for those with whom we disagree. 

We are mad.  Mad at "The Man," mad at gays, mad at insurance coverage and lack of insurance coverage.  We are mad about marriage, mad about taxes, mad about Mexicans. Mad has become our go-to emotion, and yet our arguments behind the anger feel thin and rehearsed.

What I really wish--what I find myself hoping against hope for--is that all of the rest of us--the hundreds of millions who must work to eat and who struggle to stay in decent housing--that we will wake up and realize that we have far more in common with our neighbors than we do with the powerful few.  When that day comes, I imagine a hundred thousand miles of puppet string yanked from our sleeves and loosed upon the ground in powerless piles.

Then, then we will gather in the streets and on the sidewalks, at our neighbor's table and in our churches, and start to talk to one another again.  We'll start to take back our lives, our intellect, our free will, no longer captive to the few who'd hoped to distract us all the way to their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

...and darlin' we'll have full control

of our own lives.