Listen up college kids, Carol Elliot’s got news for you. According to her, you’re being… Listen up college kids, Carol Elliot’s got news for you. According to her, you’re being brainwashed. Now don’t be alarmed, it’s completely reversible. All you have to do is listen to what she has to say, agree with her and adopt her opinions as your own. You see, according to Elliot, a county treasurer from Haverhill, N.H., she lost her reelection campaign to a 20-year-old Dartmouth student because someone apparently led college students to believe that they were allowed to vote. ‘ ‘It was the brainwashed college kids that made the difference,’ Elliott told the Valley News of Lebanon. Before I came around and assumed Elliot’s philosophies as my personal doctrine, I used to think college students could understand political issues, were an important part of the political process and were completely capable of making decisions for themselves. Little did I know that I didn’t actually believe those things at all. Actually, it was the brainwashing talking through me. Luckily, once I read what Elliot had to say, I realized that she was right. I mean, everyone ‘mdash; everyone who’s not brainwashed, that is ‘mdash; knows that young people aren’t supposed to vote. Just check out the voter turnout for the 18-to-24-year-old demographic for the past decade. So, according to logic, if college students are young people, and young people don’t have high turnout, then college students shouldn’t have high turnout. Which means that the high voter turnout among college students this year can only mean one thing. It must be the result of something unnatural ‘mdash; something like brainwashing. The real question is, what force is capable training an unknowing college student demographic into an army ‘mdash; a Communist army! ‘mdash; that will use its vast numbers to destroy this country one 66-year-old Republican county treasurer at a time. Some people blame the brainwashing on the students’ professors. Maybe they are flashing subliminal messages between PowerPoint slides, they speculate. As for me, I think the professors are just innocent victims in this twisted mess. No, the force behind this affront is much more sinister, at least three times as scary. I speak, of course, about the textbook industry. Think about it ‘mdash; it all makes perfect sense! And by perfect sense, I mean it actually makes no sense at all. Textbook companies not only control what students read ‘mdash; and you better believe they do ‘mdash; but what students smell. This is because textbook companies use a special dye called ‘ink’ in their printing presses, which, according to many, many, many pseudo-scientific studies, creates a hallucinogenic effect and leaves the brain vulnerable, causing the reader to unquestioningly believe whatever words appear on the page. For example, have you ever been reading a textbook and felt you eyes get kind of dry and maybe glaze over a bit? Do you have the sensation that you’ve read pages of text, but can’t recall a word of it? What you may have discounted as fatigue ‘mdash; you have been brainwashed to do this, by the way ‘mdash; is actually the insidious agenda of the textbook companies at work. Take high school government classes, for example. You know, the ones that talked about ‘social efficacy’ and a citizen’s duty to vote and take part in the political process, no matter what his age? Well what Elliot knows, and what I know now, is that normally young people would never fall for that stuff. Young people know that they aren’t smart enough or important enough to matter. Plus, they have their television to worry about. And it doesn’t end there. Why do you think everyone believes in global warming these days? And why do you think science majors hold so much power in society? Fact: textbook companies are owned by science majors ‘mdash; ever notice how there are very few English literature textbooks? If you really think about it, this explains a lot of things. A psychosubversive plot crafted by motiveless textbook companies to train an army of liberally voting college students using a special ink, which actually drugs the students into believing whatever they read makes a lot more sense than the alternative: College students are a politically aware voting base that frankly may have actually wanted to elect one of their own into local government as opposed to an old, out-of-touch, apparent brainwashing expert. Don’t believe any of this? You’re probably brainwashed. E-mail Molly at [email protected] to see the light.