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‘The pen may be mightier than the sword, but can it outdo an Atomic bomb?’ …Unknown
It’s the 21st century and a pop singers’ hair-do holds newsworthy precedent over the slow depletion of our planet’s marine ecosystems. This isn’t another science fiction nightmare designed by Hollywood screenwriter’s - it’s the planet’s most underrated reality show and you are a lead in the cast.
The history of how we were ‘Pied Pipered’ into this slaughter of priority began with advent of the industrial revolution. Newsworthiness took on a new dimension favouring advertising and the spread of propaganda war and since governments have begun to invest in television networks and newspapers employing a formula that dictates fear and scandal to dominate front pages, while gripping facts on the life-balance of the planet are allocated to obscure placement targeting science-lovers and people who read papers for the entertainment section.
The Ad monster
This new hierarchy of priorities have conditioned us to seek out the ‘mindless’ content on television to soften the stress of having slogged the day away to pay for that new car we are told is cool to drive. Enticed by ad campaigns we become so swept up by the world of Nike and French fries that we forget to check on the state of the very foundations that sustain this lifestyle. If we don’t open our eyes advertising will continue to subtly play on our right of choice. We eat what were told tastes good, wear what we are told looks good, buy what we are told smells good and do what we are told feels good. At the end of it all what is really happening to our power of choice over our own basic senses - the very elements that makes us individual and human?
Billion-year old Gaia
Since two thousand of these ago when we were still few and far between, we fostered a belief that there will always be plants in the interest of agriculture, when it’s the ecosystems that aren’t in the interest of our stomachs we should be concerned with.
The media owes people answers as to why food stockpiled for famine is as tangible to those who need it as phantom cash on the trade markets. According to conspiracy theorists this kind of ‘inaccessible information’, is evidently hoarded in secret Pentagon files along with how many aliens actually live among us and who killed JFK.
Information that would probably cause mass frenzy if it were let out of the box , which is evidently the reason its kept there in the first place. Yet a mass mutiny is exactly what’s needed. Governments deeply fear power to the people, which is one of the reasons they decide to screen what goes on television. Propaganda is very real and we are more susceptible to it now than ever.
The advent of saviours
After most of the forests are depleted and there’s no more oxygen to balance off the carbon dioxide that global warming ushers in, we may regret that the media paid attention to environmental matters solely when natural disasters claimed lives and devastated large tracts of human habitat. The future will have us hosting all sorts of famous guests on the disaster VIP list and the more the party hots up, the more could arrive. If it wasn’t for the likes of Al Gore, who in retrospect wouldn’t have had as much time to pay attention to the Inconvenient Truth as we needed him to had he become president, the tipping point for this would never have been reached.
Until the world is saturated by The Fourth Estate in the importance of this information it will betray its very raison d’etre by catering to the masses instead of justly educating them. A good example of neglect to this point is the true newsworthy scandal is the reported rate ‘two US football fields per second’ rainforest destruction, as opposed to sensationalist question as to whether Britney is certifiable.
Thanks to Gore, environmental statistics are no longer for the interest of just a select few. We all need the oxygen plants give off to balance a world that’s running on archaic, unsustainable technology that faithfully reinforces carbon-based pollution while there are plenty of alternatives. Earth slowly continues to fatten the greedy Black Sheep of the industrial revolution: global warming, and knitting a blanket from these emissions won’t be warm enough to protect us from the mere two-degree shift needed to manifest the next ice age. High-risk laboratory experiments like these that make it harder to sustain six and a half billion people on water, agricultural diversity and grazing ground alone.
Its time to stop suffocating our children’s children at the deforestation rate of 78 million acres (31 million hectares) per year: an area larger than Poland… …it suited too many people the way it was while they were temporarily blinded by greed at the price of our children, and their children’s future. Iis time to put our foot down and start to effect changes…
Tell-a-vision
Technology has shifted us from the hearth, where the eldest in the family tells tales rich in moral fibre, to the cinemas who take on the task of feeding the story-hungry mind. Movies imbed themselves in the psyche, substituting the fireside trends of good vs. evil with extreme archetypal projections of the future. Worlds consumed by technology where emotions become a weapon, because the bad guys who run it all have none. If you look closely enough, you’ll notice tales that explore the eroding effects of ignorance on human nature. They warn us that through greed and stupidity we are gradually sacrificing the gifts of sight, smell, taste, touch, doomed to disintegrate into ghosts deprived of the true experience of our surroundings.
Greed is a product of ignorance and lack of foresight. It’s imperative to educate the public instead of dictating to their five senses what is superior for economic gain, according to someone else’s opinion of status.
Author Malcom Gladwell takes a candid look at the nature of this kind of psychology in his book ‘The Tipping Point’. In a scenario he makes use of the mind of the conglomerate in situations of dire danger explaining that the more people who witness an injustice, the higher the likelihood that responsibility to rectify it becomes someone else’s problem. This only falls away when there’s no-one else around.
The Revolution
It’s easier to slip into a coma than get out there and put up a fight, even if you don’t win. We shouldn’t have to watch a Disney movie to awaken the hero/in within. If the media publishes more facts, for example, about planetary dysfunction instead of confining them to select pages, we would be amassing an army and really living out true emotions. We lack exposure to things that move us we miss being moved because the coma becomes suffocating.
Movies appeal to the inner parts of our character that get no external stimulation because they are generally numbed to paralysis. It’s not inherent in our nature to be passive participants in someone else’s existence. Celebrities hold their status because they act out scenarios we yearn to see ourselves in, so we live vicariously through them.
There are people sitting on the sidelines cheering that belong on the field, but doubt their true capacity to play because someone else is always successful.
This is changing. Hollywood, of all places, has begun to pay its karmic dues this millennium by releasing a list of educational docu-dramas. In oil-industry expose ‘Syriana’. George Clooney plays a US envoy to the Middle East revealing a string of events that lead to a deeper understanding of the irony behind the value of this commodity. Academy award nominated ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ dabbles in sharing the perspective of truth, versus the powers that be. Its plot intrinsically highlights the power of the media to induce pro-active changes through people by informing them of things that truly matter to their existence.
The meek shall inherit the Earth
‘The Constant Gardener’ presents another example of Hollywood’s Samaritan efforts to undo the materialistic, care-less attitude it unknowingly fostered since the twenties. Only this time, medical multi -nationals are targeted for using poor African countries as guinea pigs.
‘Lord of War’ on the other hand tackled the African arms-deal industry, sending a ripple-effect through society after its release coincidently ‘de-throning’ that the corrupt, genocidal leader of the country it focused on and replacing him by a powerful woman of integrity and righteousness. The story may have been loosely based on certain events, but it made its point and cause generated effect. A most recent example of this power is Edward Zwick’s ‘Blood Diamond’, which tackled shocking sacrifices made in the areas of Africa’s diamond trade resulting in a constant trickle of successful turn-around events reported in various forms of business media.
Consider this - are we so distracted from the possibility of being able to change things from the comfort of our lounge, that we don’t realise how easy it may actually be to ‘play god’ with everyone else. A powerful archetypal strand commonly flows through the informative streak Hollywood has leaned toward: Our ability to identify. We are deeply enraptured by movies because they rouse emotions, make us feel and move us, things we lack generally in everyday life.
The power of the masses lies in the force of emotion and conglomerate mind. Think of this in terms of the power of thought, the sooner we need to realise its our call, the sooner we make our move to use the media as a tool for our redemption, but until then it may be wielded as the most powerful weapon of mass destruction, a time-bomb slowly exploding as the years pass, exposing decay of individual choice and the important things in life, like breath.
Visit the global warming awareness 2007 website for more information on this pressing issue. Juanique Pretorius is an activist and journalist, founder of Equilibrium Physics Africa, Research Institute and Foundation for Sustainable Development technologies. Her present research is focused on a documentary series highlighting Africa’s potential for green development. For more information contact equilibriumphysics@gmail.com.