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Scratching the Itch
The whole point of so much of what we do seems to be to weed people out. We do it for fun, and without awareness.
The following miniature news item, accompanied by a voyeuristic surveillance camera photo, ran as filler in Redeye, the Chicago Tribune adjunct publication for the too-busy-to-read crowd:
"Police in Kansas City, Mo., are looking for a woman who went on a rampage at a McDonald's because she didn't like her hamburger, The Associated Press reports. Police say the woman caused thousands of dollars in damage Dec. 27 when she became upset that the restaurant wouldn't refund her money.
"Employees had offered to replace her hamburger, but the woman refused and demanded her money back.
"Police released a video showing the woman throwing a sign and a bucket of water over the counter and pushing off a glass display case and three open cash registers. She then cursed and fled."
The point of this story, headlined "She's Got a Serious Beef," was entertainment. Very slight entertainment, to be sure - half a snicker's worth, maybe. "Police are looking for her." Hah!
The reason I pause at this sad little shred of news, this slice of unhappy trouble on a poppy-seed bun, is because something here feels enormous: This is the flotsam of a life coming undone, but the context in which it is displayed as "news" is solely for the sport of watching someone screw up, and it makes me want to administer a Zen slap or something across the face of my profession. Stop it! Stop purveying disconnection as news.
To put it another way, responsible journalism involves more than scratching the itch.
"The principle of wholeness thus requires looking for, and responding to, complex interconnections, not single acts of separate individuals. Anything short of that is seen as a naïve response destined to ultimate failure."
Since newspapers are so desperate to reinvent themselves, what if they tried being part of the solution instead of part of the problem? Our disconnected culture is running out of options. Forget our berserk, privatized foreign policy (robot planes, a mercenary army, a war without end); we're unraveling on the home front. We have the world's largest prison population, by an enormous margin. We're down to our constitutional right to live in fear, and to fire back. As a culture, we're as lost as the woman in Kansas City who didn't like her hamburger. To laugh at her is to laugh bitterly at our own spiritual void.
Perhaps, if we are to save ourselves - and in the process, avoid destroying the world - we need to start listening to the voices we have historically tried to silence and to start taking seriously the cultural worldviews we almost destroyed.
This is the conclusion that has been growing on me, at any rate, since I read the book quoted above, Returning to the Teachings, by Canadian Crown Attorney Rupert Ross. This 1996 book, by a legal professional whose job included prosecuting crimes in tiny Aboriginal communities across northern Canada (a woman going crazy at a fast-food restaurant could easily have been such a crime), explores the growing movement in these devastated communities to disentangle themselves from the Western "justice" system that has been imposed on them and to reclaim, and heal, their lives.
The absolutely shocking thing about Ross' book is how it spills beyond Aboriginal culture into our own. It's more than just a happy account of tribal cultures rediscovering ancient traditions. As the book examines the failure of adversarial, punishment-focused justice in tiny Northern Canada communities, readers cannot help but think about its failure everywhere.
The more I read, the more convinced I became that our approach to life - in essence, to dominate it rather than understand it holistically - is the "primitive" one, and the time has come to stop acting like clueless captains of our own fate and to start seeking wisdom: to start exploring the ways in which all of life is connected.
As Ross points out, one of the key differences between Aboriginal and Western justice is in the focus. While we obsess over single criminal actions, the facts of which are examined in detail at costly, adversarial trials, at the end of which judgment is pronounced - and nothing changes in regard to root causes - the Aboriginal community focuses instead on the relationships damaged in the wrongdoing and sees the healing of those relationships as the top priority.
I know I'm not alone in believing that the place to start our renewal is to focus on healing. Once we commit to this and begin seeing ourselves, just as Aboriginal children learn to do, as "participants in webs of complex interdependencies," everything will change - including what we tolerate as news.
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Once we commit to this and begin seeing ourselves, just as Aboriginal children learn to do, as "participants in webs of complex interdependencies," everything will change - including what we tolerate as news.
Good point. What constantly frustrates me is that so many are beginning to recognize the importance of acknowledging interconnectedness in nature but not the interconnectedness in human society. Not only is it "difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it" (Upton Sinclair) but it is important for predatory elites to prevent the common people from understanding something when the elites' income depends on the people not understanding it.
Sioux Rose
KIVALS: Our entire society functions on left brain or logic and for the most part feelings are considered inconvenient. To fuel sentience for the web of life, inclusive of that which exists among human beings, FEELINGS must be honored, embraced, felt, processed, and most of all... dealt with! I have several friends, one has a Ph.D who routinely ingest anti-depressants so that they WON'T implode and show feelings at their jobs!
Remember a writer named Doctorow who regarded Bush as the "unfeeling" president? Bush symbolizes the empathy deficit that is so typical to too many Americans. I am unsure of the title, but there was a fascinating book done on the suppression of feelings in young boys and the author concluded that in worst case scenarios this absented experience of feelings was expressed as "crying bullets."
The entire capitalist paradigm relies on competition as opposed to cooperation, except in those tiny team-playing enclaves; but even in those, there's usually covert jealousy and envy going on. You know better than most (given many of the items you've posted in this forum) that the thinner the elites slice the proverbial pie (of goodies as well as necessities) the fiercer the competition between workers over these limited spoils. Our "Disaster Capitalism" oriented economy is making sure the crumbs are sliced tightly, and lots of people are unwilling to make waves lest they join the legions of the homeless.
One of my sisters works for a huge corporation in NYC and has been worried about her job being canceled for two years. She lives with incredible stress. Lately they have her doing her job plus the one that belonged to the person just "let go."
Thinking persons can probably recognize that every sane and just battle undertaken and won over the course of the past four to five decades has been eviscerated by the elites, who through tax laws have strategically gained vast advantage through an embarassment of riches (the better to purchase politicians/lawmakers with). And so some see EPA laws rolling backwards to protect polluting industries. Others see job benefits rolled back with the threat that said industry will otherwise move overseas to tap a lower-paid work force. Still others see the way the interests of every day citizens (state budgets included) are being rejected so that public money can pay for bankers, war/the MIC, and now the insurance con game.
There comes a time, and Bob Dylan perhaps best defined it: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose," when even sedentary persons stand up, for they have had enough. The elites are definitely pushing this line in the sand. Things may get quite ugly before they breakdown entirely, so that the intended Phoenix can rise.
I agree.
The elites are giving us a world that is not worth living in. That will br their undoing.
"But liberal activism is sort of like sending a rabbit to sell wolves on the benefits of veganism." Joe Bageant
Capitalism is the issue,
the rest is diversion.
Soux Rose,
“Last year, there were nearly 57 million prescriptions written for sleep meds. The commonest reported cause for insomnia is stress, and financial stress is highest on the list.” – Janice Dorn, MD, PhD
Makes me wonder how many over-the-counter sleeping aids were sold?
Here's a link with some interesting economical history facts and why this country is in such big trouble today:
(http://www.economyincrisis.org/content/us-economy-trouble-and-heres-why)..
I understand your frustration, kivals.
It helps to alleviate it by concentrating on getting one's own 'house' in order. It is the one thing we do have control over.
as I ponder the future, the single thing that seems to me to be the most difficult thing to sacrifice (outside of physical necessities) might be rapid, reliable, verifiable global communication...
the internet, opinions aside, is an incredible moment in time...to be able to publish, at will, in real time, to anyone in the world...
of all my future fantasies, becoming the physical victim of the lack of such communication is a reoccurring theme...how to balance this need with industrial havoc...
healing is good...what are we healing, and how? is a change in perspective a priority? is information helpful? what information? what about actual substances that might assist? is pot a possibility? I believe it is...critically so...
you know I blame private property...let's get those gardens growing!
Well, what do you expect would happen after 30 years of being told that money is the only reason to see anything or anyone as having any value? What would you expect to happen after 30 years of divide and conquer politics? This was the whole idea behind the neocon take over of the country. They WANTED us to be at each other's throats. It's FAR easier to rob a people blind when they are busy arguing about something else.
And they have done just that. Our national treasure is gone, replaced by IOUs left by those who stole everything. Our national sense of unity is gone, replaced by Reagan's "it's your RIGHT to hate whoever you want" bullshit. Our sense of any value inherent in anything is gone, replaced by the dollar signs in people's eyes now.
The country is over with, and those who had more than they would ever need 30 years ago are the ones who have made out like bandits. They have everything, the rest of us can share the crumbs they have left and be thankful for it, goddamnit. This is EXACTLY what they wanted to happen. It's just a shame that those who start class wars don't ever TELL you they are declaring war on you, they just start screwing you and buy the politicians and courts to make it stick.
Until WE, as the PEOPLE of this country, realize that we are stronger in our numbers than they are in their money, we will continue to lose everything. Until we start fighting back like our lives depend on it, we will continue to lose our futures and our children's futures and lives. If this is the war I believe it to be, then it's time to stop being "nice" to the rich and take back OUR country. They stole it from us, it's time to get it back and if they get their asses handed to them in the process, so be it.
Repeal the REAGAN tax cuts. That's a START. Then we should tax the hell out of ANY corporation that moved it's factories offshore. Then we should tax the hell out of companies that refuse to hire American workers while calling themselves an American company.
But first, we MUST get rid of private money in elections. ALL private money. What we have now is nothing but a system of institutionalized bribery and corruption. Until THAT changes, nothing else CAN. That must be first. Then it will be US who makes the decisions, not money. Money makes the most stupid decisions possible, as do those who live by it alone.
Hear, hear!
What you said was right on every point. I'd take us further back on the tax cuts however -- to Eisenhower, with 91% (ninety-one percent) on upper incomes.
Gary
And just so, reach out to whom?
You are right about one thing: This IS enormous.
Some PR whiz understood that the public is coming undone and a revolution is in the offing. The worst kind of revolution for a control obsessed police state is a spontaneous one.
So they responded by publishing this news in ridicule form to dissuade people from doing something "silly". The elite's attempts at putting a lid on the rage are sophisticated but they won't work.
You are wrong about this trivializing of news as a profit seeking vulgarity. This was a PR exercise and a good one at that. It shows increasing desperation among the elite to "keep us down".
Lots of luck with that.
I think there is much to learn from the indigenous cultures, and I really appreciated Koehler's statement that OUR culture (the western, "advanced" one) is indeed the primitive one; it is the one still stuck in the reptilian part of our brains.
I had never heard of that book he mentions, so it is on my list. I would also add "Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future" by Melissa Nelson.