Editor’s note: Eric Dietz has never written a column and Beth Behland has never drawn a cartoon, so for the last newspaper of the semester, they decided to switch.

There’s a cover-up going on in this great nation of ours, an information cover-up.

We’re all being duped, folks. Our beloved government, many corporations with cabalistic acronyms for names, and various national organizations are participating in this great information scam.

They are allowing us to know only what they want to know. We are being spoon fed a pablum of worthless, and often false, information at a rate so dizzying our brains cannot process it anymore. We have become zombies, accepting the nightly news at face value and scooping up the USA Today to see what clever pie chart they’ve come up with this time.

So what are they withholding from us? What’s the story? Is this some sort of a joke? No, dear readers, I kid you not. This is very serious.

We, as a nation, are having so much wool pulled over our eyes that we’re collectively choking to death. Our bodies are screaming for oxygen, and that oxygen is the information that is being cloaked from our view.

Let me illustrate …

What They Allow Us To Know:

Our planet is rotting before our eyes.

Racism is bad.

omophobia is bad

Government is corrupt.

Our education system is a mess.

Our country is sinking in red ink.

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Who, at any given time, has the top album in the country.

Who is this week’s hot actor/actress/model.

What Donald Trump is up to.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a marketing phenomenon.

The list could go on and on and on. The point is, HALF OF THIS STUFF WE ALREADY KNOW, AND THE OTHER HALF IS WORTHLESS.

The latter half items, all the worthless stuff, are INFORMATION DECOYS. They are designed to avert our attention from the stuff we already know, and while trying to deal with both the STUFF WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT and the INFORMATION DECOYS, we are totally oblivious to any REAL INFORMATION that may leak out from Washington or boardrooms across the country.

Pretty sneaky of them, eh? I confess, I am fooled and manipulated on many occasions. I have stayed up late and watched Richard Simmons’ Deal-a-Meal cryfest on some obscure cable channel. I devour People magazine with a fanaticism bordering on religious hysteria.

But I know what they’re up to. I know their little info scam. I just play along, blending in, laughing in all the right places.

I have to. Because if you’re discovered, if it becomes obvious that you’re hip to their little game, they toss you to the CIA to be bat around like a cat toy.

And you know what happens to cat toys—they end up buried in landfills.

Yeah, I think I’ll just play along.

For awhile.