Media

I admit that I spend too much of my waking hours consuming news media. I suck it all up. I used to read both the Seattle daily local papers until their content became so watered down and consistently unrecognizably different it really didn't make sense. CNN, MSNBC, NBC and almost all of the alphabet soup of main stream media, I used to drink as much of it in as I could. Change the radio station in my car from NPR and your gonna getting the big old stink eye. I'm talking to YOU partner.

Just today I think I choked up/teared up to at least three different media stories.

An NPR story about a group of Japanese actors, lead by a husband and wife team who staged a play in China that portrayed the events in China in the 1930's when Japanese soldiers slaughtered Chinese civilians and solders in the hundred of thousand in the Nanking Massacre had me totally teared up in the car. The plays message was that the Japanese people need to recognize their guilt in that atrocity at a time when many Japanese Nationalist want to pretend it never happened. At the end of the play the actors bowed to the thundering applause of the audience and then got down on their knees and touched their foreheads to the stage floor in an act of repentance. Yeah, I was crying then.

Stories of soldiers in Iraq who have made the ultimate sacrifice, stories of their young children and spouses left behind. Stories of injured soldiers who have to fight the federal government for decent care for the wounds (horrific wounds in a lot of cases) they acquired fighting in our name. Check, always crying to those too.

Stories of the war profiteers such as Hailburton, Blackwater and on, and on, and on. Non-compete contract. No oversight. They break my heart for the squandering of BILLIONS that could be rightly used in these struggles, or short of that used right here at home helping to fix the nations education system, health care, homelessness, senior care, the hungry, the list is too long to write here. That's not even addressing national debt retirement or equitable taxation. Yup, shed more than a few tears on those too.

I'm a liberal but it is too difficult to point fingers either right or left. They are all complicit. Only trying to get or retain power. Power = money. And I get it. We all need money regardless if your a big company who can pay lobbyists to do your bidding in Washington or the small business owner at home. We all have to watch the policies that government effects and measure that to our bottom lines.

What I hate is the death grip control of the mainstream medias ownership, to whom we, the American citizens gave our rights to the broadcast airways of America. You have to look at the companies that these corporate behemoths (G.E., Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch...) own. How many of them profit from war ? Many.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was dead on the mark when he told us, on leaving office to "beware of the military industrial complex". That was 1961 - 46 years ago, and the majority of Americans still don't get it.

I try to urge all my friends and anyone that will listen too look outside the pablum we're being fed by the mainstream media, look at foreign news agency's English additions, search for the fair and balanced reporting that we were promised when they divied up the air ways. Fight the administrations attempt to consolidate corporate media ownership that the FCC is trying to enact.

I believe in my heart that democracy is being dismantled brick by brick and if we don't look up from our daily struggles and stop watching the infotainment of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, or a racy story of a New Jersey cop's missing wife, If we don't recognize that we are being controled by the art of distraction, we're all gonna be in a world of hurt.

End Rant.