Your Insignificance Will Be Televised

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13343

Your Insignificance Will Be Televised
by Allison Kilkenny | March 10, 2008


The national media is quick to remind the American citizenry that their opinions don't matter.

Meanwhile, moments of democratic triumph go largely unreported. Take, for example, residents of California voting out all five members of a local planning group that had backed plans to allow Blackwater Worldwide to open a training camp in their area. Blackwater claims they hightailed it because of noise regulations and not the angry battle cries of the California residents, which is a lie. If the California residents had warmly embraced plans for the mercenary training facility, Blackwater's merry engineers would have rushed in overnight to start building. It was only the will of the people that prevented this from happening.

Despite this awesome moment of democracy trumping corporatism and the military-industrial complex, the national media largely ignored the story. Why? Because media deals in tragedy, not inspiration. The media portrays American citizens as perpetual victims - pawns in a big, scary game where their votes are stolen, their jobs are shipped overseas, and their children are left to die in understaffed emergency rooms, while they scramble to take out a second mortgage from predatory lenders just so they can pay the hospital bills.

snip//

I have heard many young voters say they're not going to vote in the national election if Super Delegates, and not the American people, decide who will be the Democratic nominee. This is the saddest kind of testament to how disenfranchised and victimized American citizens have become. Instead of organizing and rebelling like the citizens of California did with Blackwater, they're already bracing themselves for getting dicked over, yet again.

Americans have been conditioned to believe protest is a silly waste of time, that being a fringe candidate like Ralph Nader is annoying and bothersome, and that they are weak, helpless creatures that will forever be exploited by our big, evil government. They must accept, says the media, that their votes will not be counted, that their children will receive a poor education and poorer health care, and they will either die beneath a mountain of debt or from the retaliation of rebels reacting to our government's retarded foreign policies. Any way you spin it, the message is clear: You are all fucked. Stop trying.

Except, that's not true, and Americans know it. That's why Democratic turn-out for the primaries has been so high. Americans are protecting themselves by rejecting their status as helpless cogs in a corrupt machine. In order to change course, they must turn off the television and switch off the computer. They must politically organize in their own communities and take back their democracy.
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[Jack Bone]

1. Kicked & Recommended!!

:patriot: :kick:

[lostnfound]

2. Twelve years of powerlessness in the face of authority conditions us for it.

Helpless cogs are so much easier to control.

[groovedaddy]

3. A lot of truth in this article - At least Obama reminds us that if we do nothing

but vote, things probably won't change. We need to be involved!

[Uncle Joe]

4. I can't help but to think of Meredith Viera's remark a few months ago on the Today Show.

The occasion was the upcoming Time Magazine's Person of the Year Award.

The Today Show to their credit had dedicated a week to the looming catastrophe of global warming climate change. Basically humanity was destroying life as we know it by our reliance on fossil fuels and apparently the Today Show knew it. Several of the regulars were stationed around the globe from the Arctic, Antarctic and the Amazon, even sampling local cuisines, Meredith stayed behind in New York and ate from a fancy restaurant menu in sympathy with them.

Al Gore up for nomination had starred in the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" warning the American People of this catastrophe, most of the rest of the world already knew this was true. This was the first time in human history that I'm aware of that an individual had won an Academy Award, (or at least the movie about him did), a Nobel Peace Prize, an Emmy for Current Television's revolutionary effect on democratizing information via two way communication and had a best selling book "The Assault on Reason" warning of the threat against our democratic republic by our dysfunctional one way media which won an award as well, although I can't think of the name of it at this time and all in one year. Al would also host a world wide Rock Concert toward raising awareness to the critical issue of global warming climate change.

The kicker was in spite of all this Viera looks in the camera with a straight face and said she hoped J.K Rowling; author of the Harry Potter series would win the award as person of the year.

I have nothing against J.K. Rowling or Harry Potter books but I always thought saving life as we know it not to mention, our democratic republic would trump fictional children's books. The lesson I took from this is that with many in the media, the real people don't matter so much as their world of fiction or Matrix, as one neocon said, "we create our own reality".

Time Magazine would go on to glorify another dictator instead, when they decided to honor Putin and people wonder why the nation is going to hell in a hand basket?