Creepy Stuff part 2: Secret Societies

This is the second in my series of things that creep me out. If you want to see the first post, Diane Keaton, you’ll find it here .

I went to YouTube and found lots of video on Secret Societies. Most of them were conspiracy videos warning me how Masons were working with Satan, Hitler, and the militant wing of the Captain Commando fan club. That’s why I chose this one (warning – brief nudity.)

What is allegiance, after all? When no one could give me an exact definition in Jr. High, I stopped saying the pledge. The Vice Principal was ready to lower the boom, but after a while he just shrugged his shoulders. “You don’t have to recite the pledge,” he told me, “but I’m confiscating your chess set until the end of the school year.” And so, he added another mystery to my life – the connection between chess sets and civil disobedience.

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” my sister, who was two years older, told me whenever I asked. She’d been saying that for three or four years by then. I smelled a rat.

To this day (and I’m considerably older now,) I don’t understand, pledges, oaths, vows, promises, or pinky shakes. Why would a sane person ever decide to make him/herself less free? Presumably when I turned 18, Uncle Sam could have drafted me into the army, had he had such non-avuncular intentions. Should I have spent twelve years pledging something I didn’t understand, just to make it seem more justified?

Secret societies are for oath enthusiasts. Such organizations lost their charm for me shortly after I realized that a “No Girls Club” might not be such a great idea.

My aversion wasn’t due to lack of exposure. My father was a Mason. I think he was a Grand Mason which left me wondering why our piano was upright. My Mother is Eastern Star, though I still have no idea what that is. I never saw her twinkling off to any celestial meetings. My sisters were each Rainbow Girls, which meant that they got to wear wedding dresses and sashay around in elaborate meetings, and had secret Gideon-bible-looking books that they left around the house.

“Don’t look in that book!” sister #2 warned me.

Of course I looked in the stupid book.

But I wasn’t really curious what it said. I just picked it up when I heard her coming into the room and pretended to read it.

“You can’t be reading that!”

“Then why’d you leave it sitting around?”

If you’ve never been a little brother, you might not understand. It was my duty, my oath-free purpose in life (until I figured out something that makes money – still waiting on that,) to bug my older sister. Rainbow was an organization that made her easier to bug, and that’s about all I saw in it.

“Don’t you want to join Demolay?”

“Why?”

“You learn secrets.”

“If the secrets are all that great, why do you have to keep ‘em secret?”

It was sort of like my allegiance question, except nobody took my chess set.

The silly hats I get, but oaths, secrets, increased vulnerability to little brothers – why does anyone do this? Secret societies creep me out – almost as much as the people who make conspiracy videos about them.