Hope Flocks

Hope Flocks
By Steve Weber
Posted April 25, 2008 | 01:56 PM (EST)
The Huffington Post reports that the media's only now turned away from Obama. But did you really think for one minute the MSM would let it be otherwise?
The obviousness with which the media has historically evaded stories about Armenia, the Holocaust, East Timor, Cambodia, Darfur, the oligarchic reign of George Bush and the groundswell of a possible Obama presidency shows its overall mission to divert its consumers from anything compelling them to think for themselves, to ponder their own existences which might ultimately obviate the need for a mainstream media itself. But since they are rarely given that option people mostly forget they should care, as long as they are fed manufactured versions of life. They need it like they've always needed the story of the risen Christ, et al.: without it, the bleak reality would be too much for animals so cursed with self awareness. Truth (i.e., mortality) is just too terrifying to face without hopes, even if they are patently false.
To the all-powerful data-disseminators, the education of the individual is important only as it reinforces tribal cohesion and the nature of our modern society seems to suggest that life be lived in the macro rather than microcosm; the essence, the complexity, the beauty of the individual is ultimately fleeting, ultimately subsumed. It is the dense, dull momentum of the mass that seems to matter, understood only when seen as if from a great height, the individual sparks obliterated by the distance supplied by our media masters. No, no, this is how you should think, this is how you should feel. And above all, buy this...
So citizen: inform thyself and free thyself.
But how to? By severing our addiction to the vast amount of info-teats we tickle every minute we would surely starve. Didn't we create from necessity an information network of umbilical cords tethering us to mother society because we began to feel the pangs of curiousness? A nation of disparate hermits fumbling around trying to gather data pertinent to their own individual existences would be as efficient as those old electric vibrating football games where the "players" shivered aimlessly across the metal field, almost never scoring except by sheer accident.
So we trusted. But after a while trusting the media was the same as trusting that Og the Big One Who Went Outside The Cave would return with an objective report. What choice was there? We were scared of mammoths and the moon. The unfortunate thing is those trustees eventually weighed personal profit with responsibility and the former won out.
What better exemplifies both the dream and the reality of democracy? It is proof that for the tribal leaders the part of the brain wherein the conscience stirs is tiny, if not in ounces then in ethical scope. They are the parts of the brain that evolved intact from the trogs who wielded the most threatening bludgeons. Like all animals, humans flock. They all have some idea of where they'd like to go but in the end the appointed leader sets the course. And if said leader leads them to warmth and security, very well. If, however, it guides them into the side of a rocky butte, the leader pulling up at the last moment to save itself while the rest dash themselves, well then really: what could be more natural? But the question remains: when we see that crash coming--and we do--why don't we pull up?
Because trusting ourselves rather than our appointed leaders is the most frightening prospect of all. We'd be stepping out into a void. We'd be letting go of mommy and daddy's hand. When Adam and Eve eats the apple, self-awareness results in banishment and knowledge is death.
It's not so much that I am a rabid Obamabot, as some might say between snickers. It is that I am a rabid Hope-bot. And hope seems to dwell inside a particular individual who expressed a sentiment not heard for some time and in a way that seemed to imply a chance at individual empowerment unseen and unheard for too long a period. In an environment where the tribal imperative seems to be 24-hour a day consumerism, it is the message of hope offered as an alternative to the dull inevitability embodied a blindly trusting and too easily led mass which inspires. As concepts they shouldn't be mutually exclusive. But as tales woven by the Mainstream Media, they are and forever shall be.