It's All Just Selling the Fear...It's Up to Us to Stop Buying

"Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains."

  --  From Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

The clever quip (sometimes known as a "commercial") blares from the ever-escalating voices on the television screen, like some exploding spleen, and threatens without remorse that if we don't have this thing, this very thing, maybe in ten different colors, and with all the accessories that the teenager across the street is carrying, the following will result - desolation, exile, isolation and/or death.

All this possibility of darkness descending upon our lives and loves because our deodorant isn't hip?  All this from when "advertising" became a dinosaur and was banished to some quaint and cutesy cave so that "marketing" could become all the rage.

Marketing - Manipulation And Repetitive Keening Eventually Turns Into Necessary Greed or something like that if memory serves.  What, never knew it was an acronym?  Something amidst the realms of BFF or LOL or CONTROL and KAOS from Get Smart which actually aren't acronyms at all but are made to look as such as an absurdist commentary on absurdist overly-acronym encountering life.

The beast grows.  Benches at the bus stop are billboards with legs.  Baseball stadiums are named after corporations as opposed to the names we knew as children.  We visit a website and "rich media" descends over the article with a cast of dancing-penguin thousands and one has to have the dexterity of a brain surgeon to click the little X and close the advert without clicking through to the greater website of product temple therein...and it becomes no wonder why it is called rich...but who is the one raking the table?

So let's turn Timothy Leary Deary (Oh....Manchester England England...across the Atlantic Sea...sing it!) on his head and say that it is time to turn this around.  Tune it out.  Log off the demographics and the analytics and refuse to be a swine on a data farm whose life is only as useful as the number of click-throughs we can incur each and every hour.  For there must be at least a few out there who wish it to be beyond the impossible and surpassing the improbable to walk into any and all places of business (especially restaurants, my goodness) and not have a Comcast-powered fifty-nine inch flat-panel blaring at us, one side or the other of the political aisle.

***

In 1961, Kurt Vonnegut wrote the story Harrison Bergeron.  In the tale, we visit a future society, and everybody is equal.  They are equal through handicaps - the strong wear weighted bags, the beautiful wear disfiguring makeup, those with beautiful voices change their tone to a "grackle squawk".  This is not voluntary.  This is enforced by the Handicapper General.

Oh, and the smart...the smart wear headsets that, every twenty seconds, interrupt their thoughts.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

This past week, having walked into a waiting room at the doctor's office and after filling out the requisite phone book of paperwork, answering all sorts of questions like some discarded middle school exam (which had the grading key at the bottom - if "Yes" is answered to six questions, make certain to medicate, disseminate, eviscerate and lobotomize before dawn) sat down to calmly wait for the clock to ding "appointment".  All was well, given a point of perspective, until the rabbit ears that were embedded into these Dumbo flaps (no, seriously, that was the childhood cruelty nickname emblazoned in my hair for all the world to tease - for as some children grow into their feet...well, this writer grew into the ears and lobes) turned the wrong direction and picked up the blaring of some news station, with a bunch of Byrneians, bickering about guns.  And this is the ambiance in a place to which people go to get well?

After being unable to retune the skull and politely asking that the channel be changed to "anything but this bitterness" the gods of irony must have heard the call and intercepting the remote control infrared carrier pigeon beams, tuned me into some cooking show where the focus of the day was all sorts of sweets.  While thinking this would be easy to ignore into the inner reaches of self-proclaimed thought, it was difficult to ignore not because of the hot fudge and the endless prattle about "sugar free whipped cream" (blech - ya only live as many reincarnations as we need - might as well get the tasty stuff) for that would have been at least a tasty and mouth-watering distraction, but because it sounded no different than the gun control debate.

They all sounded one step away from used car salesmen - whether delivering the news or sharing a recipe for chocolate thunder double blubber over/under five thousand calories upside downed-fount explosion cake.  The volume, high.  The intensity, rehearsed.  The urgency, frightening.

And we're willing to pump this distraction not only into our living rooms but into nearly every crack and crevice that we visit?  Who needs a Handicapper General when we self-medicate?

*******

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said. 

"What about?" he said. 

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

Two bombs explode in Boston, a school in Sandy Hook is attacked...we move back through the calendar, the years flip, and the senseless tragedies that have occurred are given names and mantlespace in our collective psyches.  Other events...not so much.  Yet the theme in all of this, and the outcome in all of these, is that the media would have us believe that the story line is good guys and baddies, heroes and villains.  A duality that leaves no room for grey (even when we incorporate our anti-heros into the fray, for Batman still fights the good fight even if he fights).  Again and again.  

How this country loves a feel good story over tragedy.

Or does it?  Is that really the narrative that comes forth from the cops and robbers we've played since youth?  This is what we're raised to believe, but lately that childhood stalwart is not so self-assured nor self-assuring.

So here we are in the wake of another horrific event, and yet again the rah-rah speeches come out.  Yes, while these words wholeheartedly endorse that darkness will eventually and always succumb to the light, now is not the time for words that will pass, for if there is no fundamental change in the way we function as a whole (as opposed to with our heads in an ostrich-hole) then we are but action and reaction.  Feedback and response.

It seems like happily ever after is shifting.  Shifting away from what's good for the world, to what's good for a faction.  A fraction of the people standing up and screaming loudest, and demanding their way.  Don't we learn around age four that throwing a tantrum does nothing.  Yet, maybe a meltdown with a few hundred thousand by one's side, makes for a bravado that doesn't waver.  And it makes for a scenario in which bravado convinces us we hold truth in our hands and thus it seems relevant to scream it out loud.

What is the current media image of Sandy Hook?  Not the tragedy.  Not the memory of those who were killed.  The collective mourning has passed (if there ever was a pause, a true pause, a quiescence and repose) but four months later...what remains?  Guns.  

On one hand there's a faction - selling the fear that they believe the ownership of guns themselves dangerous and this danger can be reduced by limiting the number and type of weapons available.

On another hand there's a faction - selling the fear that they believe the world is a dangerous place and only with unlimited access to all types and quantity of guns, is safety to be found.

At the end of the day, the two entrenched sides to this debate sound exactly the same.  Just like the news channel and the cake-maker.  Both selling their wares of fear.  Where's what's fair?  How will we fare if this is what we've become - trying to make the other succumb through making them afraid?  Is this really what we want to be toward each other?  Is this really what we want our children to see?

Where these tragedies once brought us a reminder of how important, how special, how wonderful it is to stand together, now underneath we still stand apart.  The ideological divide has become ingrained in the American consciousness and it leads, because even if it doesn't bleed each night, it gets flowing the salivaries of the extremely vocal.  Why is it that a difference of opinion is given so much power to create an intercontinental divide?  Why is it that differences of opinion can no longer live in tandem?

The endurance of the human spirit is unmatched, no doubt, but until we can be endearing to each other, every act that attempts to destroy some of us will only continue to divide us and make it easier to destroy us all.  And that might be the most frightening realization - that in horror, we are allowing the noise and the clutter and the self-centered opinion-nation to keep us still standing divided.  There is no pick and choose in united we stand - it is either all, or it is frail and fraught.  But united, does not mean we must all be the same.

It seems somehow related, and it springs to thought being a teenager and working at a video rental store and telling a customer that Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers should have won for Best Cinematography.  The customer looked at me, and beyond the stereotyping of an action film being unable to win such an award he told me how much he disliked the film.  So, explaining that there are so many types of media in the film - things made to look like commercials, the sepia tone, the black and white, the 60s sitcom take, the animation, the words projected on the characters, and so much more...he stepped back and said, "I don't like the movie, but looking at it that way...I can see your point."

Not liking a movie does not make it a bad movie.  Not agreeing with somebody's opinion, doesn't make the opinion wrong.  Maybe more importantly, telling another that they're wrong, doesn't make any opinion, right.

We can choose to disagree with a person's stand or response, and that's fine.  But not liking the response and the response being wrong are two different things.  Not liking an opinion does not automatically make the opinion wrong.  When did this concept become so...conceptual?  It must be the fear.  The fear of being left out.  The fear of being wrong or failing.  The fear of being different.  The fear of living in a modern age in which there is so precious little space and time and help to reflect in quietude, so as to have the nerve and bravery (so different from bravado) to step back.  Maybe even apologize for being part of the problem.  Because we're all entwined in the problem, right now.

******

We must stop selling the fear to each other.

To do so, we first must stop buying the fear.  We must sell it back to them with silence.  Silence is the greatest tool against the weapon of unending disquiet.  For otherwise, the loop continues.  Feedback.  Response.  Feedback.  Response.

Shhhh...but don't mistake silence as the end point.  For we must make certain our silence doth speak as well.

Turn around.  Tune out.  Log off.

Turn around.  Put the media away.

Tune out.  Listen to Springtime in the air.

Log off.  And look up at the birds in the sky.  Maybe then, we'll notice our neighbors.  Strike up a conversation.  Accept their differences...because it's good to break bread with the people next door and that's more important than what they believe in.

Every last soundbyte, every last bumpersticker phrase.  Every last meme.  So much obfuscation for something which is so straight-forward...for truth is always that - true.

Finding the truth is so distant now, mixed up with so much opinion.  How can anybody truly know?  We must recall and teach what the DNA of truth sounds like, looks like, tastes like...before we as a species lose this intuition, this instinct.

Thank you to all of those who help, who volunteer, who are willing to get blood on their hands and put themselves in-between the creatures who would do harm and the harm that may come, to make certain that those who are bystanders and are injured and maimed...are comforted, and have a chance to heal.

But it will take more than just ripping apart fences and strangers tying tourniquets, for heroes to emerge.  The reactionary lifestyle we lead can only be kept fed for so long.  Counter-punchers will always run into a strong left-hook, but neither can our strength be in an all out brawl.  It can't be.  It mustn't.  When there's nobody to attack, the solution cannot be attack anyone.

We must never let compassion become a blur...whittled away into a soundbyte or a cause.  We must remember that an explosion and a massacre must never be reduced to just a distraction to keep us from the real work and the ultimate truth. 

Reading Harrison Bergeron, this much is clear - it wouldn't be a stretch to say that as a philosopher, Vonnegut was about as anti-authoritarian as they come.  Would Vonnegut identify with any political party at all?  Doubtful.  But one would have to figure he'd be placed somewhere along the left end of the spectrum - for underneath his absurdist writings and brash demeanor (maybe one day there will be reason to drop in the story of the conversation we had) is a humanism and a caring.

In some strange twist, in reading a bit of analysis on Harrison Bergeron, it was pointed out that the political right has begun to claim Harrison Bergeron for their own discourse, their own narrative.  That it is used to illustrate their belief that the programs of the left, which are geared toward equality, will lead to a bastardized world in which equality will most certainly be taken to such an extreme as in the story and thus there is a justification for not helping others lift up from their lot in life.

It shows, certainly, as an artist, that once the work is out there, the interpretation is endless.  One's intent, is moot.  But maybe, in a strange twist, if there's a willingness to see past the bluster and the wool, that if nothing else, there's an opportunity to see past the facade of donkeys and elephants, and agree on this one thing - that the future as portrayed in Harrison Bergeron is a happily ever after that few of us want to see come true.  And if we can agree on that one little thing, even if from across a great divide, there is hope that maybe we can find ourselves, one day, upon a more common ground. 

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance?"

***************

If you've read this far, you must think, feel, wonder, posit...something....about what you have just read.  Even if it is but a greeting, leave a note at the bottom, to mark tangible trace that you were here.  The internet does not have to remain so impersonal.

Want to learn more about The Rooster's Crow...visit http://www.theroosterscrow.org

P.S.  All text in bold & italics come directly from the story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut