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Conversation about Media Lens

February 11, 2003 admin

These are in Previous Comments posted in PILGER FILM, “Palestine is Still the Issue,” VINDICATED BY INDEPENDENT TELEVISION COMMISSION

From: Yvonne Garcia [yvonneg@tampabay.rr.com]

Media Lens is wonderful…thank you…I subscribed.

I read an article on their site, HAPPINESS IS DISSENT – THE TRUTH ABOUT 'LOOKING AFTER NUMBER 1,' and here are two paragraphs that grabbed me:

Unrestrained hedonism, relentless consumption, “greed is good”, “the 'me' culture” – all of it has failed, horribly. It doesn't necessarily feel like it has failed. Facts and figures, and even personal misery aside, it is in the nature of greed that it blinds us to the negative consequences of our selfishness – the advertisers and political servants of corporate society are forever on hand to give any doubters a persuasive leg-up.

We can choose to continue to be deceived if we like, but it won't make any difference – we will not find happiness in self-obsession. Meanwhile we will continue generating the global environmental conditions that will quickly increase our suffering to a point where denial will no longer be possible. The choice is ours: we can either begin seriously experimenting with the benefits of working for the well being of others, or continue trudging the neon-lit boulevard to personal and global disaster. It looks pretty, but as buddhists also tell us, it is merely “honey on the razor's edge”.

You know, Suzanne, so much of my life I always put the needs of others before mine, and I had come to believe after years of therapy and all kinds of consciousness paths I have taken that I was just not loving myself. I think this is true, but that impulse I have had since very young was not wrong — and, when I look back, no matter how difficult it might have been or even if I got “burnt,” I was happiest when following that impulse. Now, I think I have come to love myself as well, and have mercy on myself as well, and so I found this article very good.

Suzanne to Yvonne:

The world has become so threatening that any instincts toward hedonism seem infantile now, and those of us who always have been serving hardly have to wrestle with issues about whether we're corrupt in so doing. But also we have to lead the examined life, and to understand what makes us tick, so that we earn our comfort with ourselves. I went to college near where W.H. Auden used to live, and on his old residence there was a couplet of his carved in stone on a plaque. It has remained meaningful to me:

“If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.”

From: David Edwards [editor@medialens.org] [David is one of the co-editors of Media Lens]

Thanks so much for your positive response to our Media Alerts and for posting them on to other people – it's very encouraging. Keep going!

Suzanne to David

Seeing as you've written a Buddhist book, look at these pieces on my old site:

A Public Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh at the Riverside Church, New York, New Holy War Against Evil? by David R. Loy, What I Would Say to Osama bin Laden — Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh by Anne A. Simpkinson

Where are you?

David to Suzanne

I'm based in Bournemouth (UK) and my co-editor Dave Cromwell is up the road at Southampton University. Where are you? How many people do you reach?

Suzanne to David

I have about 250 people on my list. I want it to be personal and only solicit people I'm interested in, so that good people get on the same page. I think a collective focus for thought-shapers can change the world, a la the famous Margaret Mead quote. Here's a piece of feedback today, as much for you as for me:

“Just dropping you a note to say that your Conversation page is now my designated “receiving place” that I check in on every day for food for thought. Your insightful comments on selections that you have chosen to include have illuminated me about how tilted and biased the mainstream media has been, especially over the past few months. It's clear that it has chosen to remain obsequious to our tyrannical administration. Thank goodness for the alternative press that sees through whatever rubbish the media throws out at us.”

I'm in Los Angeles. You know, I've spent a lot of time in England, in crop circles. That's the big story that will rock the world — the only thing I can see that would shift consciousness and conceivably get us out of the mess we are in. Could we keep shooting at one another once we knew we were under observation? I don't think so. It's as amazing that it is being ignored as it is that it is happening. We aren't making the outstanding formations, so what is? There is mind at work. Where is it housed? Are you hip to the phenomenon, or just as blasé as most English people are?

David to Suzanne

I'm afraid I probably fall into your 'blasé' category – I've never paid much attention to the crop circles issue and was happy with the 'people with planks and string' explanation. But our concerns are probably not that different. I believe that excessive concern for the self is the cause of most of our problems, and that increased concern for others is the solution. Keep going with the great work…

Suzanne to David

You've nailed it re concern for the self rather than for each other as the fundamental problem. However, I would love to enroll you in at least having crop circle curiosity, given how dire things are for humanity and what a hope they hold for a consciousness shift. Even cursory attention brings you to the understanding that we cannot be making them. See the latest “challenge” piece I've written.

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World Press

MEDIA LENS keeps me sane!

February 11, 2003 admin 58 Comments

For one source that will keep you riveted on what really is happening, get on the list for Media Lens. I get the feeling that if the world could meet in its pages, we could make things work. In addition to astute criticisms of goings on, you also get a sense of things we can do.

Here's the ending for two MEDIA ALERTS (on their site you have to click on Media Alerts and then on the title of each piece) — about a major appearance Blair made on British TV, BLAIR'S BETRAYAL – PARTS 1 & 2 — which are written with this premise: “We believe that Blair consciously sets out to deceive the public while obscuring his deceptiveness behind an appearance of sincerity. If this sounds like wild speculation, recall that it has in fact been standard political practice since the time of Machiavelli.”

All of the facts in this two-part Media Alert were readily accessible to us – part-time, unpaid writers – and yet almost none of them were raised by Jeremy Paxman – a full-time, professional journalist backed up by a large BBC research team – nor in the press in the days following the interview.

These omissions are obviously not the result of incompetence – it takes no competence at all to seek out well-known, credible sources, even via the web. Lack of resources is also clearly not a limiting factor. Nor can lack of significance explain these oversights – what could be more vital than to establish the basic facts challenging a prime minister's fraudulent case for war?

Instead, these omissions, we believe, are the result of a long-standing, institutionalised media aversion to seriously challenging establishment power of even the most ruthless and cynical kind. The reason is not complex: the liberal media so often trusted by the public – the Guardian/Observer, the Independent, the BBC, ITN – are all very much part of, and deeply dependent on, that same system of power.

We have a stark choice: we can continue to be deceived by the illusion of a free press, in which case many thousands of people will continue to be killed in our names but in the cause of profit and power. Alternatively, we can expose and challenge the 'liberal' propagandists stifling democracy. Journalists, even admired radical ones, may choose to maintain their silence to protect their hard-won reputations and lucrative careers – it's up to the rest of us simply to tell the truth.

These posts followed two others, FULL SPECTRUM DISSENT – PARTS 1 & 2, the likes of which I haven't seen from progressive political sources. In fact, they speak to what is missing from progressive politics. These pieces go to the human behavior that needs to be in our focus as what makes us who we are, and the deep understanding we need in order to change our world. Here's the conclusion of Part 1:

A crucial reason for modern levels of unhappiness, malaise and depression, then, we believe, can be identified in the impact of a filtering system distorting even our most fundamental ideas about ourselves and the world around us. Corporate interests need us to pursue a version of human happiness that serves profits but not people. The results include individual depression, global environmental collapse, and wars for control of natural resources in countries like Iraq. In Part 2 we will discuss the possibility that there are more rational approaches to achieving human and social well-being, and that these, too, have been filtered out by the propaganda system.

And here are quotes from Part 2:

“The ultimate root of many of our problems is that very many people care a great deal about themselves and their immediate families, but very little about anyone else. This is the basis of much unthinking obedience, passive complicity, and enthusiastic participation in state-corporate destructiveness. This self-centered concern, in turn, is rooted in the deeply entrenched – but, we believe, false – conviction that personal happiness is best achieved by applying maximum effort to securing the needs of ourselves and our immediate families, such that we have little inclination to attend to the needs of others deemed irrelevant – people who often pay an appalling price for our actions. We often rightly focus on the logic and function of state-corporate systems, but we need to remember that states and corporations are in the end mere abstractions – they are made up of, and run by, real people.”

“Compassion and concern for others are of course implicit in much dissident thought – relief of human suffering is quite obviously what motivates many writers and activists. But explicit focus on the importance of such concern as an antidote to individual human misery, and to the many problems rooted in the unrestrained greed of corporate capitalism, is almost nowhere to be found in contemporary radical thought, just as it is rarely found in mainstream scientific and other thought.”

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Crop Circles

Conversation about COULD WE SPARK A CAMPAIGN?

February 6, 2003 admin

These are in Previous Comments posted in COULD WE SPARK A CAMPAIGN?From: Wade Frazier [wade.frazier2@verizon.net] [Wade has a great site for “making sense of these times.”]

Regarding wanting to “start something,” my writings lay out what I am trying to do: “I ask nothing of any reader except to honestly consider this site's thesis and information.” It makes it clear that energy has always been the name of the game for humans, ever since they left the tropical forests a couple million years ago.
Until the underlying political-economic (and probably spiritual) reality behind why there is no alternative energy is comprehended, we can have a million “bright ideas,” and they will go nowhere. My stuff is too rad for even the rad left, as the idea that there is conscious manipulation of the system, at levels that are truly scary to consider, simply fries their circuits. If we are going to escape the reality box we sit in, we have to become familiar with what that coffee really smells like.
The problem, as I see it, is having the mental horsepower, emotional strength or integrity to “get it.” Virtually every activist I have seen — political, social, religious, or economic — is mainly hacking at the situation's branches, not its root (and 99% of the population is not doing any hacking at all). If just one percent of the population devoted one percent of their effort toward the root issue, bringing sustainable harmless energy to humanity would be an easy task. That is what I am shooting for.

From: Beverly Russell [bevruss@earthlink.net] [Beverly is about to get a lifetime achievement award from a design organization.]

Your socially conscious writing on 8 Mile is full of heartfelt energy and emotion. I wish the architects would DO SOMETHING. They have a responsibility to rebuild the environment and they can do it any way they really want. Mostly they want “big.”

From: Linda Genutis [LGenutis@aol.com]

In response to your saying, “Let corporations compete for how great their social services are,” have a web application/site for Fortune 500 companies where employees make material donations — clothing, toys, computers (or money, of course) — to social service organizations of their choice. This application would tally up donations monthly by each company. This could also serve as a volunteer match website for employees. I would be happy to create the website design, including a customized application which would incorporate all of the above. This link is a resume website I completed a month or so ago for a friend of mine.
Suzanne to Linda:Thanks, Linda, for your willingness. That is such a great site you did — it kept making me cry.What I'm proposing is for some ideational thing to happen, where we'd stop climbing over each other and become concerned horizontally. How can we shift context? The alignment of people — only a few — can work magic. So I thought to enroll some specific people in this advocacy. If the right spirit were established, then what you've suggested doing would be a good way for people at large to get involved.
Linda to Suzanne
When I first read your “Could we spark a campaign” message, the first thing that came to mind was Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, memes, and some recent writings on the power of prayer. But, after reading excerpts of The Tipping Point, I found it fascinating that positive societal and cultural changes can occur simply by the efforts of a small group of socially minded individuals — to such an extent that the message they are communicating takes on a life of its own — like wildfire across the entire landscape of humanity. It's something I've always suspected — I guess that's why it makes so much sense to me.
I totally support your quest to follow through with this idea because I know it to be true. I've had the honor of experiencing it on a first hand basis — the “primordial collective unconscious mind.” It's powerful, it's real, and it's undoubtedly the designated vehicle that needs to be tapped for meaningful change to occur — for now and forevermore. Amen!
Suzanne to Linda
I keep chewing on how to make impact. I think about Sheldrake, too — that a morphic field gets ignited by a spark. That Margaret Mead quote must turn up everywhere because it states a truth: “A small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”
You talked about a “wildfire.” My favorite thing Brian Swimme said to me is, “We're both pointed at the same thing — igniting a great raging forest fire of love that will sweep us forever out of this deadening sadness of egos and superficiality!”
Linda to Suzanne
You say, “I keep chewing on how to make impact.”
Remember that 70's “I'd like to teach the world to sing” commercial? And remember Disney's animated Hiawatha movie that had that song “The Colors of the Wind?” And what are the similarities between crop circles and music? And why do so many of us who have experienced a kundalini awakening hear on-going choruses of voices singing? How about approaching a company that manufactures a popular brand name product to do an advertising campaign that conveys the message of peace, love, harmony etc., with a song?

From: Allen Branson [me@allenbranson.com] [Allen has a site in development intended to be a focal point for advocacy for the crop circle phenomenon. We are lucky to newly have his webmaster help.]

Your thoughts on 8 Mile spark me to respond.
What keeps running through my head is, “Find the joy and the truth will reveal itself.” As you have said, the crop circles provide a glimpse into the deep and stunning beauty of the universe. 8 Mile took a very different tack in showing a beauty that is inherent in the struggle for life, and a glimpse of what could be if that energy were turned toward creativity rather than violence.
My feeling is that people are desperate for permission to dream again. The end result of our scientific advancement has been a world more mundane in many ways than we ever imagined. Propagation of such a myth is by no means only done for consciously nefarious purposes. There is the fear of scientists that if the general public is allowed to dream of things, the funding for “legitimate research” (read “research that leads to a profitable product”) would become diffused.
Yet, there is this matter of joy and truth. Can a people in touch with the wonder, joy, beauty and mystery of this world allow the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis so that they can maintain the privilege of polluting their environment while stuck in rush hour traffic?
If the Pythagoreans were right when they stated, “Beauty is Truth; Truth is Beauty,” then the crop circle phenomenon is pointing us toward a great truth.
Suzanne to Allen
What a challenge to turn a world so pained to serious consideration of joy. A Maslow scale kind of thing. Joy is the biggest box, I think you could say. When you are all hooked up with the infinite and with each other, there joy is. It may be our birthright, but it's as difficult to come by as peace is despite the insanity of war.
Right on about the circles. It keeps washing over me how beautiful a source they are coming from. No way anything malevolent could be making those designs.

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