I switch on the television. And flick it right off.
It’s like static white noise to my ears.
I find little in tv-land to teach me kindness.
Scrolling through my social media feed, I shut it down in a blink. Sorting through endless bits of nothing.
Try as I might, to discover the door of entry into engaging discourse – dialogues that uplift, elicit compassion and social well-being.
Searching for way-showers, who demonstrate with their words and actions how elevating communication looks, sounds and feels.
Breaking new ground for an innovative and more wide-awake community of humans.
I come up short.
There are exceptions, of course.
And many would contend that it’s not the job of our electronic platforms to play that role.
But I disagree.
How do we learn to embody more life-sustaining behaviors for our human family, if not through our interface with the worlds around us?
Dispiriting, indeed, that our media should too often deliver such non-nutritive displays of dysfunctionality and lowest common denominator.
Like a dreary sitcom on an endless tape-loop from the 1950s.
Characters and set props, rearranged and served-up again as if for the first time.
How will we know what it looks like to break through the limits of mediocrity, if not provided with living examples?
Our newscasters aren’t going to do it. They can’t.
Bought and sold by corporate interests, most dish out little more than sound bites of the status quo.
Sanitized and surgery-modified talking heads – who power up their morning shows with a hefty dose of a consensus reality — but with scarcely a wise word of their own.
Is this merely the ‘cost of doing business’ with business?
Shareholder-indentured companies who peddle their latest magic-bullet – with a scary list of side-effects – to a weary and dulled out audience who expect nothing more.
They’ve got it right in some ways. Odds-on, we will go ahead and ‘ask our doctors’ about that touted little pill, like a compliant bunch of robots – because we see in ourselves the same maladies and inadequacies as the characters on our screens.
We presume, as they do, that these potions will fix us. And heck, why not? They promise to get it done with no strings attached – dietary, lifestyle or otherwise.
Only to discover later that we’re left hungrier, sicker and stuck with a whole new set of complications.
Why do we allow digital dramas to distract and entrain our energies with maladjusted storylines? Characters, recycling the same old broken communication loops.
What can we learn from them? Except perhaps, not to do what they are doing …
Unfortunately, “we’ve-always-done-it-that-way” continues to fuel inertia – and the entrenched patterning that hasn’t worked for decades.
On a smaller but flourishing scale, I’m encouraged and inspired by the proliferation of podcasts, thought experiments and other alternative media. Who are bringing to the table a cutting-edge menu from some of the most brilliant, innovative and heart-centered visionaries of our generation.
Trail blazers who are busting through limits and old paradigms. Fiercely committed to transforming our collective experience on Earth into the celebration it was always meant to be.
I believe that good journalism, good television can make our world a better place.
Christiane Amanpour
Most rules that you think are written in stone are just societal. You can change the game, really reach for the stars and impact the world.
Sebastian Thrun
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