CULTURAL ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME (AIDS)

WHO AM I?

     I am 1-billion Facebook users, 5.5 million Twitter users whose Tweets or posts flow through our Technological Social Media arteries. My virtual friends “share” items that flow through my Social Media accounts. Because my “friends” are “friends” to others who are “friends” to others, and so on to others; I imagine the sense of “self” of this largest group is a giant cultural bloodstream of real-time, unedited, and uncontrolled messaging. After all, the theory of “3-degrees of separation” might be in play here.  Friend-to-friend, post-by-post we “share” with one another good things and bad things: nice celebrations, reports of wrongs by governmental agencies, pictures of my vacation, death by cops, violence and corporate greed; incidents which none of us individually, our family, or friends, can control in any way. We are really sharing cultural powerlessness. We are powerless over what technology reports, and in some cases causes to happen in and to our culture.

     In many ways, we are powerless over our own bodies as well. In the physical disease of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) the body’s capacity to resist “foreign” cells or “infection” fails because the number of white (defensive) blood cells is diminished. The white blood cells defend the overall system by going to all of the cells in the body and determining which are “me” and which are “not me” (foreign). The white blood cells destroy the “not me” cells (the infection) and protect the integrity of the body.

     What plays out day-to-day in Technological Social Media are reports of political gridlocks, terrorist attacks, protests, fear over anger, and hatred which go against our personal values, ideals or morals which once we shared with genuine friends before “virtual friends”. That’s what made them friends. We shared values and priorities. Once it was genuine and real. Now it is pretense.

There is no technological “white blood cell” mechanism (no Technological Immune System) to test whether or not the things flowing along via Social Media are “me” (my values) and they go unfiltered and unchecked directly into my consciousness. Many are false posts. Some are real ads. Some are lies consciously planted by provocateurs who wish we would buy their “remedy” to the fear they promote, support their “cause” so they can “save” us, or work for someone else.

     This media stream is overloading my heart. Sometimes I feel revulsion, sometimes my “friends” say they are going out to buy guns, sometimes I get a dose of fear, my heart grows hard, my capacity to know my community as genuine “Friends” is compromised, my life is gerrymandered away by foreign (“not me”) forces. I am losing my strength. Am I suffering from technological Social Media AIDS?

WHY AM I HERE?

     The French Revolution happened within a society when one sub-culture within that country was overwhelmed by the values and priorities of another, more dominant culture. The peasants got out their technology – the guillotine - in order to eliminate the overly pernicious, fiercely greedy, aristocracy. They performed “Cultural Surgery”. It was a revolution that instituted the “rights of men.” “All the Kings horses and all the Kings men could not put Humpty-French-Monarchy together again.”

We don’t have Monarchy – we have Corporatism. Technological Social Media serves Corporations and the message flow down the technological arteries show that the “old order” of “me” values like citizenship, brotherhood, equality, and civic power is being swamped or infected by economic priorities, partisan values, and sectarianism. Regardless of which cultural values you treasure, you probably rarely see yours reflected on technological Social Media.  We are unraveling.

     When you treat actual AIDS you may find that the amount of medicine and its power may kill the patient. Treating technological Social Media AIDS, if such a thing were possible, maybe so painful and require such sacrifices many citizens would object, the same way “loyalists” defend the “crown” in previous revolutions.

     Those in control, sometimes called “tyrants”, never want to lose control, and so respond, gain strength and push back against any attempt to curtail their power. The AIDS virus actually degenerates all parts of the body to feed itself. The Social Media AIDS will do the same.

WHAT DO I WANT?

     Resist the urge to blame: we are not the only “Social” who have chosen to use “Social Media”. The Media serves multiple corporations, governmental agencies, international states, and their paid provocateurs, who are your and my friends and relatives.  Data gathering, based on words we use is shared to marketers and Governmental Security agencies. So, there are very large, powerful entities who value technological Social Media and they arise from multiple directions at once. But, this is only technology. You control all technologies by using the “off” switch. Or, you can change the dynamics in the technological stream by flooding social media with messages of other principles and values. You as an individual choose to change the message.

The U.S. was founded on universal spiritual principles: religious liberty, economic brotherhood, and equal rights. If we, each of us as individuals, reclaim these principles in our own non-technological, human lives; our own personal actions with one another, we can, from the inside, build a new Human Social Media which will create Cultural White Blood Cells and our renewed Culture will reject the forces of greed, fear and hatred, the “not me” forces of the oligarchy and their supporters which flow through the Technological Social Media.

© Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved

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TAMIR, HUCK FINN AND THE SENSE OF ADVENTURE

By Jean Yeager

WHO AM I?

What part of the human spirit sends a Tamir Rice to the most dangerous place near where they live, a small city park, so they can be alone and play and dream and imagine with a toy gun beneath a hard, bare, concrete picnic canopy littered with heroin needles? What sends Tamir into such a place where adults would not go alone?

Young boys, the Tamirs, like the Hucks of previous generations, have an indefatigable sense of adventure up until the time grown-ups shame it, blame it, or otherwise constrain it out of them. Adventure is the air which children breathe, they “sense” adventures like people with eyes can see or people with ears can hear. Children are a receptor for the spiritual medium of adventure which exists around us all.

Grown-ups sense the danger in adventures.

Grown-ups know the reality. Grown-ups have grown into reality, have created the reality in which they live. Grown-ups try to numb ourselves to adventure because life has damaged us, beaten us down, told us we can’t win or covered up our adventure senses.

Grown-ups are jealous of kids who still walk hand-in-hand with Dame Adventure. Grown-ups warn children against small cottages made of candy in the dark woods and the old people who live there, of dealers in old houses with broken windows, of the wild beasts who lurk and wish to devour them, of black sedans or squad cars; and always, always grown-ups tell stories of young children who were never clever enough, never strong enough, never brave enough because grown-ups want the child to be what? Cowardly and fearful like ourselves? To avoid risk like us? To not get involved?

 

WHY AM I HERE?

Young boys, like Tamir and Huck believe themselves brave enough, clever enough, strong enough to overcome an addicted Pappy, a lack of privilege like our friend Tom, a lousy education from a poor school, a heartless community of auntie Pollys, and the dangers of the River. Like Tamir and Huck, we started our journey breathing adventure floating on a raft down a big, big river with deadly currents and dangers. We loved it.

We are now grown-ups who breathe anxiety. We are afraid to look upstream. We know what we will see. Our River has been dammed and diverted. The water of our lives is now used for watering golf courses, McMansion suburbs, and factories whose technologies transform the living into plumes of acrid, killing smoke into the air and dumping toxic effluent back into our lives.

            Education for what? For a maintenance job that kills the soul and pays so little, we have to get a second job or a third? How did we become fearful Aunties or absentee Paps drunk on our self-importance?

Adventure in our neighborhoods has been transformed into racial profiling sludge, Army-style cops, soul pollution, and community doubt; far deeper and more treacherous currents than ever ran in the River before.

Why can’t we grown-ups be brave enough, clever enough, and strong enough? We live on the River of life, too.

 

WHY AM I HERE?

We can breathe adventure again, too. And, when we do, our spirits will light up. We have arrived at a place downstream from where we started that we never imagined, at a future we now dread. In a strange land with which we must cope. But, why?

We can put the past we could not imagine, our fears we wished we could avoid, our shame, our blame, our failures, scars, and weaknesses into the soles of our Nike’s and walk, like Tamir into the park, the garden, the dark woods, away from our homes, in our ’hoods, away from the self-made prisons in which we have locked ourselves away. Give away our privilege. Go where it is not safe. Go meet the danger we have created, you know it well – it matches up perfectly with our personal short-comings.

Go for adventures. When you feel fear, you will know you are close. You have hidden long-comings to transform the fear. Be a lonely Huck on a raft, floating away from un-civil civilization. Be a Tamir and take a walk into the park.

Things will be different when Tamir, like Huck, has a companion to journey with him. He needs a powerful individual, once enslaved, but now free - you. You can be free and strong.

Tamir would not be dead if he had not been alone and someone like you was with him.

 

© 2016 Jean W. Yeager, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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