Looking Back, What Was YOUR 'Holy Sh*t!' Moment of Truth

[tazmic]

Stig of the Dump.

I was about 8. The teachers in class had us all watching a television adaptation. At some point Stig, in his dump, points over his shoulder, towards the town, and tells Barney something like "You see, all those people are prisoners, because they are all trapped in their minds. But me, I'm free. I'm free because I'm out of my mind."

I remember looking around the room - no reaction from the kids; except for some of the teachers giving a smile, nothing had changed. But I think I realized I had experienced what might be called 'having a new thought'. A totally new one. I looked at the teachers and thought (something like) "Holy shit, these teachers have no idea what they've just done."

It was several years though before the walls of the school fell to the ground around me when I looked at the religious studies teacher and thought (something like) "Holy Shit, these adults are just as screwed up as us kids."

There was no turning back from that.

[NeonLX]

^^^That is cool. I think I'm having a Stig experience right now.

[Luther Blissett]

I wanted to say that it was when I was seven and saw the Communion book cover for the first time, in a grocery store, but that seems awfully late to me. I had assumed I had seen that at a much younger age: three or four, but I just checked the release date. I should have already been well-versed in "fortean" subjects, thanks to my mother's books, from a very young age.

I really don't know the real answer. I've always been strange, with strange thoughts in a strange family who told lots of "ghost stories."

[MinM]

I was getting ready for one of my last days of school as a 1st Grader. While watching the Today Show my mom comes down and asks .. "What happened to Bobby Kennedy?"

Up until then they had just been recapping RFK's California Primary Victory (they had apparently led with the shooting prior to my turning on the TV). So I said something like .. "Nothing 'happened'."

I'm still not sure if my mom had a premonition, or an expectation(?), but she somehow knew before we saw the actual announcement.

After that I found myself glued to the Watergate Hearings. Then the House Select Committee on Assassinations... Iran-Contra hearings... It all added up for anyone paying attention.

[undead]

Mine was when I was forced into a psychiatric hospital for criticizing the mental health system, after being threatened with slander and libel lawsuits from a prominent drug researcher. On my last day, right before I was released, there was a woman who had just been forced in and was complaining about how everyone in the place was dangerously over-medicated in a group meeting. She said it was her third time being sent there, only because her family didn't want to deal with her, and that her kidneys were failing from all of the drugs they forced her to take. Although she was coherent and civil, she was physically restrained and removed from the meeting. That was when I realized how extensively rotten and diseased the society of the United States is. Now I choose live in a backwater country teetering on third-world status because it hasn't yet sunk to the depths of prison industry and human experimentation you find in the US.

[NeonLX]

I thought of another lightbulb* moment for me...about the same time as my Vietnam "revelation", one fine autumn day when I was probably 12 or 13, we were out harvesting corn in the mile-long field just east of our farm. Of course, the kind of corn we raised was the stuff that gets fed to livestock, not the kind that humans eat. Anywho, I was waiting at one end of the field on a tractor pulling an empty wagon. My dad was running the combine harvester, which was filling another wagon being pulled behind. As I'm watching and listening to the big machine come at me, I started thinking about all of the corn we grew, almost a thousand acres of it, and how much time, effort, energy, water, etc. it took to grow, cultivate and finally harvest it. Then the livestock would crap most of it out, so I'd have to clean all of it up. When the combine finally made it to the end of the field where I was waiting with the empty wagon to swap, my dad hopped down from the machine and I hopped down from my tractor. We unhooked our respective wagons and I walked over to my dad to ask the question, "Hey dad, how come we grow all this corn that takes so much energy & resources & that only cows and stuff can eat, when we could grow food that people eat directly?". He took off his cowboy hat, scratched his head for a few seconds, then fixed me with a stare. "Just what in the hell is wrong with you?" was his reply.

We got back on our machines and went back to work.

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*a pathetically dim bulb, but it's the only one I've got...

[Seamus OBlimey]

I was 7 or 8 when they wheeled my fiend out of class to a "special school".

[psynapz]

*a pathetically dim bulb, but it's the only one I've got...

CUT THAT THE FUCK OUT ALREADY. You make meaningful contributions here about as often as anybody else, despite what you think, so STOP BEING SO FUCKING HARD ON YOURSELF!

[ninakat]

1969: 16 years old, realizing I was gay, realizing that I was fine, realizing that everyone in my world wouldn't think so. I waited 6 more years after moving to the big city to get my butt out of the closet. That was my personal moment of truth -- the realization that what I was taught was somebody else's "truth" (a lie).

The bigger picture stuff has been an ongoing process (viet nam, reagan, aids, iran/contra, iraq I, anita hill, waco, nafta, ok bombing) but learning the truth about 9/11 and peak oil put me over the edge to the point where I reassessed everything in my life, started questioning everything, and began what has become an almost 180 degree shift in values and purpose. I'm now cultivating the things I can have some control over (food, art, love, conscience), and trying to live in more balance with nature, who bats last.

[Luposapien]

More of a slow process of stages for me, I'd say, and I had a somewhat late start having been raised in the Mormon church, and otherwise largely by the TV. Regardless, after a long series of events that primed the pump, as it were, my true moment where things flipped for me was during the 2000 election. They had just "incorrectly" called Florida for Gore. I don't remember what network we were watching, but they cut to a shot of the Bush family sitting around their living room or something, and GWB had this air of what I can only describe as confused confidence as he gave reassurances that Florida was, in fact, in the bag. Not those specific words, of course, but that was the gist. It dawned on me at that moment that the fix was in, and he knew it. Someone had gone off script, and he couldn't understand why they would be calling Florida for Gore. Sure enough, next thing you know, they're back-peddling, and Florida is back in the game. All the insanity to follow, with the non-recount, the unfathomable capitulation of the Gore campaign, and the installation by the Supreme Court of an unelected president, pretty much just served to cement in my mind that it was all a huge farce. By the time Sept. 11th rolled around, and I heard the news that a 2nd plane had hit the WTC, one of my first thoughts was that the Bush gang was somehow involved, and that it was going to be getting very ugly in America very soon.

[Lottie McLotsaluck]

I love reading these; absolutely a joy to know that I am not the only one who, at the very least, can scry that sumpins gone a bit bad here in "God's Country!"
I was between 13-15 years old when the Iranian Revolution (and 'hostage crisis'), the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and the 'Reagan Revolution' happened.
I started to put together that the shit they say on the news just doesn't add up in so many ways.
I had been a nerdy enough kid to have watched the 1976 election returns with my father *still remember being confused about why Carter wasn't taking office the very next day
Watergate had even fascinated me to a certain degree because it seemed like all (and I mean all) of the adults around our house, school, etc at the time were saying that voting for Nixon was the worst mistake they had ever made-it made me wonder "Did no one vote for the 'other guy' ?(McGovern RIP)-people were slightly more honest back then I think!
Alas, I too, had many 'lightbulb' moments telling me that we were not being told the truth about a lot of things- many times the USSR was thrown back at me for what I guess was supposed to be a 'well at least we don't live there' kind of a kids starving in China, clean your plate kinda thing -I guess?? (really like so many things here, I just haven't been able to grok a lot of this stuff! I mean 'X' nation is more fucked than we are, so shut your mouth!? WTF!
This had the effect of making me very interested in geopolitics --and still I didn't put it all together-I am just very slow apparently! I did manage to do some traveling around my 17th year which was also very eye-opening-it seemed to me that the different european families that I stayed with and the people I met 'over there' were living a better (not just 'different' but BETTER life than we do in the USA and they were mostly a hella lot more intelligent than many folks here. And I speak as one who knows she ain't one a them intellektuual tipes!
It wasn't until finding Rigorous Intuition about 8plus years ago that I finally realized how fucked everything is -and I wouldn't go back to being 'asleep' for the world. I think a lot of people now realize, on a subconscious level at least, how bad things are getting, they will be in denial until the curtain fall ,and I think that the 'fat lady' is clearing her throat, at the very least, if not about to bounce into one a them there aria things!

On edit: meant to say that it is a joy knowing that some people here took a lot longer than others to figure it out! Cheers also to the ones who listened to that still inner voice and woke up quickly!

[jcivil]

Fight to win.

Everything is possible.

Which of these was the first moment?

Finding out WWI was a fake. (Except to the dismembered

Democracy/Fascism/Communism run out of one office.

A synthetic dialectic take your pick (No matter who you vote for the gov't always gets in, indeed.)

The novel 1984 was about 1954.

WWII was a fake. (With plenty of real suffering)

Dulles and Dulles and Iran etc

Tonkin

October surprise

The They Gang runs the most dope. Uses prisons cynically. Dark Alliance (Two shot suicide Webb)

Pedophile murderousness is a requirement for power. King singing RNC anthem twice.

Neil Bush son planning dinner with Hinkley's brother night before Reagan shooting.

Global warming is proven (1982) and we are going to see some action taken.

Rape porn as evidence is public domain, no law against it. Say wha?!?

Kerry cover up Iran Contra drugs and warcrimes. Cassolaro.

Trance formation/ thanks for memories / et al

First Gulf War (Go ahead, invade. That's what she said.)

Rwanda Invasion ( keith harmon scott )

September Eleventh

And they myriad others. Presente.

[yathrib]

Finding out that UFOs and aliens were not quite fact, but more than the farcical fiction portrayed in shows like "My Favorite Martian" or "The Flintstones." Then in 7th grade I stumbled upon a copy of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and learned that all the rah rah "history"presented in my school was a tissue of lies and whitewashing, so to speak. Or the fact that my ninth grade history book--which was already ten years out of date, by the way--claimed that Hitler "carted the Jews off to prison camps to protect them from the wrath of the people." You'll notice most of this involved books, because you just didn't discuss or mention this sort of thing out loud in the 1970s Midwest (which was more like 1950s everywhere else). And then there was the discovery that adults I knew and trusted could abuse that trust...

[ninakat]

And then there was the discovery that adults I knew and trusted could abuse that trust...

Yeah, that was a biggie for me too. Church on Sunday, every Sunday, along with Sunday school, vacation bible school, catechism, the whole nine yards (sans mass since we weren't raised Catholic), really portrayed for me the total hypocrisy of those institutions. Learning I was gay at 16 and facing the draft a year later (it ended the year after I was eligible), but still in the closet for self preservation, really boxed me into a corner. I tried, through the church (United Church of Christ), to receive Conscientious Objector status, but was refused. So I'd planned on leaving the country, but as luck would have it I received a high draft number and was spared the cruelty of "service." Did I receive any support or understanding from any of the adults I knew, including my parents? Hell no. But at least I had enough self-worth not to commit suicide, and I still had dreams to sustain me. Of course, I'm no longer that vulnerable, powerless, trapped kid, but those experiences sure left a mark. Never forget.