It’s raining men, hallelujah!! (or women or children, so what!?)
A recent
blog post about the thousands of blackbirds that fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve 2010
about the thousands of blackbirds that fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve 2010 deconstructed the media’s uncanny knack for not asking the right questions when it come to getting to the root of a particular issue. I too see that as problem, but one on the laundry list of problems with what has come to be coined “the mainstream media”. I imagine a large potato shaped head with an eye at either end, dotted with mouths that all speak at the same time, spewing the snatches of info that they got from one of the two eyes. Of course, the farther away from the eye, the more blurry the story, and even at best, they only are getting half anyway. Then, in a blink, its gone and off to the next peep show. The “media” has attention deficit dollar disorder and we, the citizens have forgotten right along with them the concept of “accountability”. We don’t continue to ask the question until we get an answer and they chase and chew on the fat corporate and political worms, hook, line, and sinker. In the aftermath, while the next celebrity’s life is drawn and quartered, issues such as the mass deaths of thousands of members of our eco-fam fade away like so many sunsets. We forget to keep asking, “Hey, what ever turned up in those toxicology reports that were done on those blackbirds, er, drum fish, or was it starfish, doves, or manatee?”
This example is brought to bear in an effort to illustrate the deficiency in our media diet. There is an interesting component to human nature that allows a thing to seemingly cease to exist if it is not named, and, if it is called out, we take all kinds of liberties with its definition depending on who benefits from it.
Did you know?
What would you think of an event that took over the entire Cobo Hall, Hart Plaza and the buildings in between, for 20,000 people to come in from the city proper, surrounding suburbs, and across the nation to work on behalf of our city on issues such as:
Housing
“Right” Sizing
Water Shutoffs and Privatization
Education
Environment
Food/Urban Agriculture
Poverty and Homelessness
Differently
Any of this sound familiar?
Would you want to know about it? Would you wanna go? Would you want to participate?
Last year, in June, the
landed in Detroit to the tune of 20,000 activists, concerned citizens, and grassroots organizations to discuss issues of utmost importance to Detroiters and the national community as well. However, at the Social Forum, when I struck up a conversation with the peppy little guy and guy running the coffee kiosk, they had no idea why they were brewing endless cups of organic fair-trade coffee with soy milkand turbinado sugar.
Not to mention its lack of coverage in the mainstream, “Lack of Coverage” being the key phrase. The one article I did see in the Detroit News and Free Press had a headline that something like “The Commies Are Coming”. Hmmmm.
Can you say CENSORSHIP?
#KeepAsking