There's a reason why CNN (The Most Trusted News Network) is now a high profile pariah alongside its bullying brother-in-low FOX, its over the hill uncles CBS, NBC and the shiftless, perpetually late ABC. It's because the CEOs who run the corporations that own those networks have too much power, too little talent and too little love for their customers. Instead of getting to the bottom of things, they choose to focus solely on the bottom line. By cutting costs, content and credibility, by circumventing the actual stuff that enriches people's life experience (far more than even Cialis or Lipitor), meaningful matter and verifiable information becomes so compromised as to be virtually invisible. People consume out of habit rather than out of need, without realizing that any real nutrition has been leached out of their diet. America's shelves are empty because its soul has literally been bought out. The virtual breadline is lengthening and every move you make, every step you take, every egg you break is a tiny section in a long chain of events that intertwine and interrelate in a Moebius loop with no end and no beginning.
That's why, I'm not proud to say at the start of another Christmas season, things suck the way they do because reality has to be approximated, because "Wii" is the rage instead of actually doing whatever the simulation is based on. We've become ever more used to the bland, the general, the mediocre. Our senses are dulled and so is our judgment. CNN and FOX are retarded brutes compared to, say, the BBC World News, which has a far more catholic response to the expectations of its audience. But back in America™, mass mediocrity has become the adhesive that binds its citizenry who are no longer incentivized to want better education, to be more vigilant about food and product safety, to expect responsible civil service and to dare hope for accountable leaders. That stuff is so Greatest Generation. What is sexy is the low hanging fruit of low expectations and lower standards. No longer is this nation the agrarian Jeffersonian society whose survival depends on the wisdom of its inhabitants but rather the shambling pleasure-seeking Brotherhood of the Uninspired Consuming Knucklehead (or BUCKS for short. I know, I know...).
Change? Things are about as alterable as a tectonic plate creeping uphill with the wind against it. The right-wing conservative Republican stranglehold began with a subtle grass roots strategy, the sprinkling of very low level judges and activists here and there, its power multiplying through sheer doggedness and the base charisma of its message, appealing to the frustrated and the betrayed: bogeymen are causing you pain, here is a solution. Simple, easy to digest and brilliant. Ahh, but the strict patriarchal disciplinarian that is the neo-conservative behemoth is the very thing that nudged America to the point where its credibility in virtually every area as a responsible member of the global community has been utterly and perilously compromised.
Change now needs to come about through individual awareness. Forget obtaining reliable information from the slick usual suspects. As cancer begins with the corruption of just one cell, so does its cure. And the aforementioned grassroots approach is the only thing that can nudge the nation back into its imperfect but crucial equilibrium. Nature cries out for balance. Extremism is a perversion of reality and the ideologues who run the media (and its related religious, military and political industries) and live by the corporate paradigm of extremism and mediocrity, use the public's hunger to drive profits skyward. Never has it been more clear that the key to change lay in the will of the One, the common sense of the informed individual to govern the nation that beats within.
Season's Greetings, all!
