Chapter 8
Uninformed Consent
Toying with another thin envelope, Bonnie began our next meeting at Nolan’s by criticizing
junk mail, primed by her son jokingly asking her before she left the house to pick up his free gift
on the way home.
“Placing a monetary value on a gift implies an expectation of reciprocity,” she said
distastefully, “notwithstanding the redundancy of free and gift.”
“Greed drains the brain,” I said, with a nod toward the pages she idly tapped.
“Intelligence has little to do with it,” she said, ignoring my gesture. “If companies can tease us
into thinking we’re taking advantage of them or pick our pockets by pandering to our fears of
having less in some way, we’re at their mercy. And we both know they don’t have any.”
“MacDonald’s and Mattel are secretly taking over the world?”
“I’m serious. If we spend money on things we don’t need, we risk displacing a responsibility.”
“We pay for gratification all of the time. It’s built into the cost of a free society.”
“Excellent.” Bonnie opened the envelope and fanned the pages. “Our merchants understood
how to manipulate semantics and nuance to stalk students into discovering their own detrimental
assumptions. From here, they could embrace new understandings that inspire the imagination to go
outside of their experiences and claim knowledge of entire concepts.”
“Meaning they don’t really understand them?” Like me, in that moment.
“To claim knowledge in this context is to understand the entire spectrum of cause and effect in
a particular arena. It’s a mental hologram within which you can instantly reference any point to
every point because you understand the role of each and its influence on the whole.”
“Duane Allman could play guitar like that.”
“Like what?”
“Roam the fret board: he could take you to undefined places, without drugs,” I added, but not
categorically.
“Good, so you do understand. Now imagine our social indoctrination in terms of political
parties and corporations roaming their threat boards to create public assumptions that obscure the
fact that they’re plucking our strings.”
“I get your point, but a free gift is an outright lie; everyone knows you have to buy
something.”
“And they do because the indoctrination has become an insidious influence.”
“How is a free side of fries insidious?”
“I know you’re capable of deeper thought.”
“I don’t want to use it all up this morning.” I nodded at the envelope. “I might need some for
that.”
“Overall,” Bonnie said, placing her palms on the table, “we are so clouded by rhetoric that we
can’t imagine the harm we cause through seemingly innocent acts. My teachers understood this
influence, so they relentlessly taught their students clarity of mind as an art to be practiced like
scales and played like a symphony.” She looked at me, the pages on the table, then back at me.
“Bear that in mind as you read about Tartuu: he knew the townies would have punished the kids for
being hungry, that they were exhausted by their daily routine, ready to be played by cruel people,
and the damage to their spirits could take lifetimes to heal if he didn’t intervene.”
“Isn’t he playing them, as well?”
“Yes, and if all goes well, he’ll teach them how to heal themselves.”
