#51 “Waiting For The Dam To Break”

Dear Don1001,

One of the hardest things for a human being to do is to see things as they are happening. I’m trying to take a deep breath, slow down and understand what exactly is going on in Washington. As the two ideologies settle in to fight their version of Armageddon, the truth about the nation’s financial health keeps getting squeezed. This is because neither the Right nor the Left wants to admit their complicity in this fiasco. The truth can be hard to acknowledge especially when you were asleep at the wheel. And right now our so-called leaders on the Left and the Right are in panic mode as they try to digest the events of the last couple of years. And they’re doing so without cutting it up into smaller chunks and chewing. So don’t be surprised if the country ends up choking on the truth when it gets too big to swallow. The question is? How do you perform the Heimlich maneuver on a whole nation as it starts to have that panicked look on it’s face as it realizes that it might die choking on a big chunk of reality? Because if we you can’t do something, we’ll have to stand there and watch the good old USA become asphyxiated, turns a sickly shade of blue and die. The deaths of empires are usually slow and messy; the only difference this time will be that the whole ugly process will be televised. It won’t be a pretty sight but you’ll still watch. Imagine the kind of Nielsen Ratings the decline of the Roman Empire could have gotten when the Vandals raided Rome. The carnage covered with hourly reports of raping, pillaging and mass killings, it would have been “Must See TV”. Nothing rivets people to the “Tube” like tragedy on a grand scale. The chaos that will ensue from our country as it becomes disenfranchised and starts to disintegrate will enable network TV to have huge amounts of cheap Reality TV without spending a lot of money. So don’t look to the networks for any real solutions, they’ll report, you unravel. Whenever a riot looks like it will get numbers, the networks will throw cameras and commentators at it until the ratings fade. Imagine 24-hour coverage of societal breakdown with quick cuts, cool graphics and 3-D simulations but no substance, wait a second, that’s contemporary TV now.  What’s maddening is that somewhere amid “all access - all the time” the truth is often hidden in plain sight, hidden by a plethora of information and images, sort of like fast food journalism. It’s fast, cheap with almost enough information to justify all of the junk that goes with it. Yes, today’s TV journalism goes down so easy and you don’t have to dwell on anything too long, especially if it’s about topics that make you the least bit uncomfortable. Yes, today’s TV News fits your fast paced life style that tells you what you want to hear, when you want to hear it. Don’t think “meat” just watch and we promise that we won’t confuse you with complex issues that may not have an apparent solutions. We will lead you, where our ratings tell us you want to go. But this will last for so long before one of these days the dam will break and the truth will roll out of the hills. And then either you’ll surf on the truth or it will roll over you.

                                                                Treading water continually, Brother Gregory

You can see videos of these sage observations here: http://www.youtube.com/my_videos?feature=mhum
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