"Fried Fridays: The Missing Pieces"

Normally I would take a funny or ridiculous story to feature for the week's wacky headline...but I'm led today to be a bit more sombre and introspective...I've been bothered by the gullibility of the general public for a long time, and seen how all too often advertising and media outlets purposefully play people and emotions like puppets, ultimately to sell a product or an idea.

I make no bones about it: I disdain news media in general. There is an obligation to inform the public about an event or situation, yet it is largely done by snippets of basic information and sound bites...and all too often more of a disservice is created than a service. Here at News 14, we make a concerted effort to be different from the other media sharks, and avoid the flashy-hypey-teasey schlock that is so prevalent.

However, no situation can be fully conveyed in 45 seconds. Between the Associated Press and Reuters wires (among others), information gets packaged then edited then published, then re-edited with basically the same ingredients listed in a different order. The result is that in a news world of Baskin-Robbins flavors, stories come out like Vanilla, unless purposefully distorted to taste like something else - but only one flavor, not the 'true' mix of myriad tastes news stories beg for.

We the public have the responsibility to ask ourselves questions and not believe everything we hear lock, stock, and barrel, yet there is an apparent and disturbing trend toward the dumbing of America into non-critically thinking people who don't know what it means to be self-disciplined and think for themselves. If it's on Entertainment Tonight, it's gospel. If President Bush said it's so, heaven forbid someone have another opinion.

So where do you stand on the Jena 6? Of course, you don't have to 'stand' on any one position. This highly complex situation started over a year ago, and has now hit fervor pitch across the country. No way in Hades can you boil it down to one paragraph and judgment, and yet I read the wire stories and listen to other news stations and I get a very empty story full of statements that are not delved into or backed up. Now as full-bore emotions are out there front and center, minds shut down and tighten the blinders as people dig in their heels on both sides of this razor-wire fence.

I don't condone violence (protecting yourself in self-defense is another matter, of course). Whether someone is 'justified' in their anger, violence cannot be acceptable. Hurting other people cannot be acceptable. Destroying property cannot be acceptable.

The flip-side is the media presentation of the white male who was beaten making it sound like he was near death - heck, the attackers had an attempted murder rap put on them. One news story said he was beaten with a tennis shoe...while his face was bloodied and swollen and hellish by all accounts, he wasn't on a ventilator or other life support, he wasn't in traction...and he didn't even stay in the hospital as he went to a school function that very same night. Inexcusably and unacceptably hurt, yes. Near death, hardly.

But that's not what bothers me most in all of this. It's that tree. Why was there a 'white' tree to begin with? It certainly existed as a black student had to ask the administration about sitting under it. An effective leader would have been aware of such a keg of dynamite waiting to explode, and should have taken action long ago to break up such a deadly, silent rift that that campus tree represented. Leadership is not a position: it's an action. By any digging around I could do, the administration took no proactive action to deal with that tree to begin with. So after integrating the tree one day, three nooses appeared in that tree the following day. Stop that bus and back it up. Outside of actually hurting someone, I can think of no uglier, evil, mean-spirited symbol of bigotry, unless you put the noose with its equally heinous partners in crime, literally, burning crosses and white hooded robes.

Supposedly officials found out those responsible for the nooses and suspended them...again, in all of my digging, I can't find mention of any follow-up school lectures by the principal, town meetings, any of that. In my mind, such an offense is far beyond a slap on the wrist...it wasn't an action, it was a BELIEF that put those nooses up in that tree. Effective school and town leadership should have jumped on that with gusto, and immediately. In all fairness, it may have well been addressed - but I'm not reading about anybody in the news media digging for that root-level information. All I've been able to see is the vanilla snippet of what's happening now, along with the one-sentence summation of each side's opinion, with one-sentence recaps of what happened. Something big is still missing. The result is and continues to be a serious, serious disservice to the public.

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

— Albert Einstein

"The definition of insanity: doing things the way you've always done them and expecting a different result."

- unknown

The answers and solutions to anything in Life will lie in not changing our actions but changing our beliefs. Don't be afraid to seek your Truth.