Recommended essay by John Kelley. Just a few points from it….

I finally got out of town, went to Austin for the weekend to see brother writer Joe Bageant, author of “Dear Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War”. I also went to the first media summit in Texas to take a look at the fairly sorry state of community media in Texas. Somehow both fit together.

Brother Joe now lives in Belize most of the time, writing in a small village on the coast a three hour bus ride from Belize City. He was in Austin reading at St. Edwards University and at the Austin Writers League. Joe is quickly climbing into that small class of great storytellers that can drop you in the world of the great, invisible, American working class. He reveals the indignities suffered when you live on the economic edge and the courage needed to face life in a world where bombing people in foreign lands for oil takes a higher priority then providing basic health care and education. It’s the real story of many people, you see them everyday, but you just avoid the question of what life is really like in their America, a condition that looks sure to spread.

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In the meantime we float along in a virtual world wrapped in advertising symbols so disconnected from the world of nature and each other we don’t even know what it does to us. The product of learned helplessness, the ultimate in advertising, resistance is futile. If we don’t even comprehend what it does to us, what does that mean for the invisible working class person we see every day let alone some poor starving child of a rape in Darfur? All unknowingly sharing a common fate.

We have to admit it, every American, some more then others, participate in war crimes and human exploitation. Cheap stuff seduces us from looking at the slave labor it takes to have “low, low prices”. What we do get out of this, is a cheapening of life, including our own. Landscapes of corporate plastic ticky tack stores, someone once said, deposited on any high traffic urban strip in America not knowing where you are there would be no clues because the all are the same. It’s a Wal-Mart world.

To make it run right you have to feed people a steady diet of distractive mind mush, so much the better if panders to their most basic instincts. It’s the stuff that softens your head for the real message the advertising. We react like Pavlov’s dogs going deeper into debt in order to keep the great consumer economy of unneeded crap fed and the rich can get richer? Only problem is we are running out of resources to buy and credit to buy it with.

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Much of the independent and community media is caught up in its technology prejudice for the quick, easy and showy forms of video. It creates a cultural divide with working folks…..

To be real community media that can influence social and political change you must look at a multiplatform model. What model reaches the people in your area that you want to get the message?

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