As I sit here on Saturday, August 19, 2017, I’m typing this blog post. There are hundreds, probably thousands of other things I could be doing. There are at least two things I should be doing—working on tomorrow’s 5th/6th grade Sunday school lesson or cleaning and lemon oiling the rest of the upper kitchen cabinets.
I’ll get the Sunday school lesson done today.
I’m in no real hurry about the cabinets. My shoulder joints and fused vertebrae ache after those sessions.
Moving on . . .
I suspect the title of the blog had some bearing on your reading to this point in the post. I have two paragraphs of explanation before hitting the ground running with text related to the title.
Since the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, political and cultural polarization has, if not increased, become more visible. There are many pundits with explanations as to why this is happening and what to do about it. If you’re looking for another rant or justification for or against either side, you’ve come to the wrong blog.
Over the past three days, I’ve seen two quotes I felt were germane to what’s happening in the USA right now. My comments revolve around those quotes and one other. The first quote is by Carl Sagan, circa 1996. I second, I copied from a friend’s Facebook share—the author’s name was not included. I assume it’s recent based on the content. The final is a vintage quote from Gordon Sinclair. I remember it from when it was broadcast on the radio in the late 1970s.
The Real America
If you asked every person living in the USA, “What’s the real America like?” you’d get over 350-million answers. They would cluster into groups of similar ideology, but few would be identical to another. Diversity is one of the strengths of our country.
Carl Sagan was an American physical scientist in the 1970s and 1980s. He achieved celebrity status by way of his PBS series “Cosmos.” He was a keen observer of the times. And he knew his American history. The page below is from a book that was published just before his death in 1996. Based on the timetable of book production, it was most likely written in 1994 or 1995.
 |
Copyright © 1997 Carl Sagan
The right of Carl Sagan to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1996 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING
First published in this
edition in 1997 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING
|
This only part of page 28.
Read it below with the verbs in the present tense. I reformatted it as well to emphasize the differences.
I had a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time. The United States is a service and information economy.
1. Nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries.
2. Awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.
3. The people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority.
4. Clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties are in decline.
5. We are unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we are sliding, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
6. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media. Once 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less) are the predominant form of information.
7. The lowest common denominator programming is the most common media venue.
8. Credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition have supplanted presentations on science.
9. Especially worrisome is the general feeling that American has no issue with living in a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Those words could have been original observations from this calendar year, not past predictions. I will focus on #3, #5, and #6. That’s not to say that I think the others are unworthy of commentary; I’ve selected the three that best fit my agenda in this blog.
#3. Few opportunities are available on a consistent basis that allow, or encourage, either agenda setting or authority. Teachers are locked into “standards-based instruction,” which too often emphasizes content over process or thinking. Regulations at local, state, and Federal levels restrict much commerce and inventiveness.
#5. Feeling good is a mantra. The right to feel good has risen to the constitutional level in many minds. On the other hand, the truth is too often decried for originating in biased circumstances or adjusted to match the needs of a funding agency.
#6. Sound bites are the stock and trade of news today. Lifted from longer parts of speeches or broadcasts, they are carefully edited so facial expressions and body language support the agenda of the entity responsible for publication or broadcast of the minimal amount of information in the bite.
National cable networks dedicate hours upon hours of airtime to selected issues. Redundancy is the standard. While using the elliptical machine at the gym this week, I was subjected to over 30-minutes of nearly identical pontification by male and female “experts.” No credentials of those experts were presented. The few points presented reminded me of a warning I heard from a speaker in a college class I took.
Beware of someone who screams loudly
and uses his own echo as support.
Quotation number two was not cited in the message I copied it from. Take a read.
The percentage of Americans who attend church each week that is bandied about in the media is 40%. I did some math. 52 million is closer to 20% than 40%. I decided to see if I could verify that stat.
I found the probable source.
I’m giving the quote writer the benefit of that validation for the numeric values in the quote.
For the sake of ease of computing, I rounded “several hundred” to 1,000. I assumed that attendees of the event in question were all from the Southeastern US. So, I added 3,000—1,000 from each of the other “quadrants” and another 1,000 as a margin of error. Our grand total of attendees at “the largest white supremacist gathering in decades” could have had 5,000.
5,000 attendees/52,000,000 churchgoers = 0.000096 or .0096%
The 1,000 real attendees (.0003% of the 323 million Americans) got thousands of hours of combined media coverage during and after their “event.”
The 52-million churchgoers got <insert your estimate here> hours of media coverage during the same time period. My estimate is “a couple hundred,” and I’m being optimistic.
When’s the last time thousands of hours of nationwide coverage of an event by a volunteer organization that included more than 1,000 volunteers aired?
Probably during and after the last hurricane. But that coverage was intermingled with another story.
Why isn’t there coverage of other accomplishments of the 52-million churchgoers? Or of the 62-million volunteers? Both those groups are more often blind to human differences than not. A person in need is a person in need.
Carl Sagan predicted an America that today’s national media has embraced if not created to serve its purposes.
Isn’t The Real America the America of "church goers," "volunteers," "givers to charity," and "people who went to work today"? The author of the quote above thinks so.
So do I.
Do I like the contentiousness in our government?
No.
Do I like everything else about America?
No.
America is at a crossroads in terms of direction at the highest levels. I’m not certain I can accurately define any of the possible directions. I’m praying that the direction ultimately chosen is not selected because of media coverage of situations and circumstances that don’t accurately reflect what’s going in The Real America.
Perhaps we (I) need to be more outspoken about media bias on all sides . . .
I close with a memory. My eyes misted over the first time I heard this on the radio. They still mist over when I hear it.
Read Sinclair’s commentary below. When I do, I’m prouder than ever to be an American.
I suspect your eyes will tear up, too.
The reality is, America is still doing most
of the service described by Sinclair 44 years later.
The commentary [below] by Gordon Sinclair is true, although people along the way have altered portions of it.
Originally written for a Toronto newspaper, it was broadcast on June 5, 1973, on CFRB radio in Toronto, Canada.
It had a big impact at the time. A recording of Sinclair reading his commentary became a best-selling record that hit Canada’s top 30. Canadian broadcaster Byron MacGregor produced a version in his own voice. It was called “Americans” and became a hit record as well, rising to Canada’s top 5, selling 3.5 million copies. That meant 3 gold records for MacGregor. He donated the proceeds to the American Red Cross.
“The Americans”
The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany.
It has declined there by 41% since 1971 and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.
As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtse. Who rushed in with men and money to help?
The Americans did.
They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help.
Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain, and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.
When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.
When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries into help… Managua Nicaragua is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped. The Marshall Plan .. the Truman Policy .. all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering Americans. I’d like to see one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes. Come on… let’s hear it!
Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglas 107? If so, why don’t they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or women on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times … and safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them … unless they are breaking Canadian laws..are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here. When the Americans get out of this bind … as they will… who could blame them if they said ‘the hell with the rest of the world’. Let someone else buy the Israel bonds, Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buildings that won’t shake apart in earthquakes.
When the railways of France, Germany, and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?
I don’t think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake. Our neighbours have faced it alone and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of these. But there are many smug, self-righteous Canadians.
And finally, the American Red Cross was told at its 48th Annual meeting in New Orleans this morning that it was broke. This year’s disasters... with the year less than half-over… has taken it all and nobody…but nobody… has helped.
God bless The Real America!
Note: Some of the situations described by Sinclair are no longer as described. There have been instances--9/11 for example--when help for Americans was provided post haste.
