A Social Lament

Something’s gone wrong with our society. Years ago the thirst for information was almost insatiable. People read newspapers and magazines. They listened to radio and watched as much television news as was available in the fifties, sixties, and seventies and even into the eighties.

Then something changed! Technology and the clamor for more information fulfilled the public’s desire and manifested into the cable universe with hundreds of channels; a mindless niche television was born into the living rooms of America.

Opinion, obfuscation, verbal attack, rhetoric and assumptions were reported and alluded to as fact. Fictitious news permeated the screens and empty minds of America. We became satisfied with what somebody else told us instead of reading like we used to or listening like we used to or watching like we used to and checking the facts.

What has happened to us? The very mechanism we relied upon to inform us has dummied us down into automatons of believers. We believe anyone who says they are reporting a story and we can decide if it true based upon what they tell us.

We take as gospel - innuendo. We repeat falsehoods and rumors as sacred truth and fiction as fact. We don’t use the self-righting tools available to us to check and recheck what somebody else suggests we believe.

A lot of it I suppose is because we are lazy and we don’t want to take the time to authenticate what we already believe to be true. We are opinionated and even if what we think isn’t true, we say so what, what I think doesn’t count anyway.

We cite as sources to our friends and family television’s Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, or Lou Dobbs. We think they are smart guys and wouldn’t say anything that isn’t true.

Yes, they are smart guys all the way to the bank. They and their respective organizations have a slant and style to sustain. Specious soliloquy has always been a captivating component of theatrical poppycock.

Radio, television and politics have a history of self proclaimed demigods and purveyors of rumor and innuendo. Father Coughlin of the Roosevelt radio days. Joe Pyne and his syndicated television talk show fifty years ago. Joe McCarthy in the Senate. Megalomania will always out in time.

The Buddha said there are only three things that cannot be hidden for long. The Sun, the Moon and the Truth.