Escapism? or Heroism?

As I watched ABC World News make another meaningless choice for person of the week, I decided enough was enough. This week they chose Carly Rae Jepsen, a young woman who was lucky enough to get noticed by Justin Bieber and now has a hit song. The only thing that came to my mind as I watched this piece was, why? Or maybe a better question is: how? How does this young woman get chosen as person of the week when she has made no meaningful contribution to society? My suspicions lead me to believe that this songstress must have some corporate connection to ABC.

So I gave myself a challenge. I bet myself that during the commercials on Jeopardy! I could find a better candidate for person of the week than ABC World News. And the most ironic part of it is that the guy I found was featured on the website of the Las Vegas ABC affiliate.

His name is Ryan Mougenel and he is the head coach of the Las Vegas Wranglers, a pro hockey team that plays in the Western Division of the East Coast Hockey League.

He was on vacation with his wife in Boston when he, along with other people, saw a man who had fallen into Boston Harbor and was having a hard time staying afloat. The group helped the man onto a nearby water taxi, and he was then transported for attention to Mass General.

This is the link that I found in about 8 minutes of searching:

http://www.ktnv.com/news/local/162353246.html

So the clear decision made by ABC News was to highlight a woman for writing a fluff pop song instead of a man who committed a selfless act of heroism, a man they were obviously aware of.

The implications of that kind of choice make me shudder. Did ABC decide that escapism is more important than heroism? Is the world better off knowing that Carly Rae Jepsen has written a hit song or that a man who was on vacation risked his life to save someone else?

All I can say is hang on as the slippery slope gives way beneath us.

Damage Beyond Control

The impact of the release of the Freeh report on the Sandusky sex abuse scandal at Penn State is beyond devastating. It reveals a complex web of coverups and lack of concern for the welfare of children that were systematically abused for more than a decade.

It was obvious that Jerry Sandusky was guilty when he gave the well played interview late last year and could not help grinning when he talked about the way he abused boys for his own pleasure. He could not deny that he done it with any plausibility whatsoever. The obvious was confirmed when the jury convicted Sandusky on 45 counts of sexual abuse.

What has been a second sickening element of this scandal is the way people have stood behind the legend and the reputation of Joe Paterno. They have rationalized and backpedaled and fooled themselves into thinking that the great coach could not have known and would certainly not have condoned what was going on in the mind of Jerry Sandusky and the showers of Penn State.

Today's report blows that point of view away. Joe Paterno had full knowledge of Jerry Sandusky's activities and was ultimately the only person who was in a position to take definitive action. But he failed to do so, and no matter whether he was more concerned for the football program or his own legacy, the one thing he was not concerned with was the welfare of the children who have been forever scarred by Jerry Sandusky's actions.

There have been reports of taking Joe Paterno's name off various structures and removing his statue from the Penn State campus. All of them should be done post haste. Penn State will be reeling from the consequences of the failure of their great coach to take proper action for years to come, and he deserves no place of honor in the history of a great academic university.

Bowling for Columbine:Ten Years Later

Late Sunday night, a terrible reminder a national tragedy was thrust before my eyes. I was flipping through the channels about 10:45pm when I saw the Michael Moore's film “Bowling for Columbine,” which was released in October 2002, had just begun. I had missed just the first few minutes but immediately hit the record button and gave it my full attention until I fell asleep a little after midnight.

When I got up this morning, I turned on my DVR and watched the film in its entirety. The heart wrenching images of young people dying at the hands of other young people, including the Columbine massacre and the accidental shooting of one 6 year old child by another 6 year old child brought tears to my eyes. The source of these tears was both despair and rage, because juxtaposed against the searing images was footage of Charlton Heston, president of the NRA, holding rallies in both locations, as bad luck would have it, just days after these tragedies occurred. His apparent indifference and lack of insight into the scope of the problem he helps to promote had me cursing at my TV.

At one point in the movie, Mr. Moore makes an excellent point by showing how young people all over the world are exposed to the same sort of ritualized and glorified violence as American youth. Yet worldwide murder statistics demonstrate how the United States is far and away the most violent first world nation on earth. The numbers cited were startling. In other first world countries, the highest number he could find was in Germany where there were 381murders committed with a gun. The exact year is not clear. The lowest number was in Japan, where there were just 39 murders committed with a gun. Then he shows the number for the US: 11,127 murders committed with a gun in one year. The stark difference speaks volumes about the culture of violence and fear that has been fostered by the media and reinforced by the government.

After it was over and I was channel flipping again, just by chance I came upon a show called Vanguard which was doing an expose on gun violence in America. This program was released in 2009 and followed a reporter to two locations. The first was in Kentucky where supporters of gun ownership proudly showed off their hardware and declared themselves real Americans who were doing nothing more than exercising their second Amendment rights. The second location was Camden NJ, which has several times been declared the most dangerous city in America. It showed how the easy availability of guns has created a massive law enforcement problem and devastated the local economy.

I looked at Wikipedia and saw how Mr. Moore's film had received multiple accolades upon its release and then I thought about the fact that although it had won all these awards, it had not changed the world at all. We are still bombarded nightly with example after example of brutal violence and the reinforcement of the culture of fear.

So I decided to do a little digging to see if maybe things had changed for the worse in other parts of the world, with the notion that maybe economic hardship had made people in other parts of the world more violent.

But my theory was not supported by the evidence. In five minutes I was able to find the following numbers. In 2009, the number of gun murders in the US, according to the FBI, fell to 10,224. The number of gun murders in Japan for the same year? Seven. In the United Kingdom the number is 63 and in Germany, 381, the exact same number as Mr. Moore cites.

So while the 5% drop in the number of gun murders may give me a slight reason to feel encouraged, the numbers from the rest of the world still prove that the US is a far more violent place to live and ten years after Mr. Moore's film slapped us in the face, we still haven't awakened to face the reality.

Mr. Moore's film made one very salient point to answer the question of why America is so violent. Fear keeps people consuming. Consumption is a large part of the American economy. This is the status quo and some very powerful people profit from the status quo. Those powerful people make a lot of political contributions. Think about that the next time the network news shows footage of a child shot dead in the street.

This Historic Heat Wave

I don't know how many times I have heard the word historic associated with this week's heat wave. In one sense I have to agree. The heat wave is historic because its unprecedented. The number of heat records broken in just three weeks this summer numbers in the thousands.

But in another sense I am disturbed. I keep getting the feeling that the media is using the word historic in a dismissive sense, as if to say that this is happening now, but that doesn't mean that this is what we should expect from now on.

In that sense I completely disagree. This is the new normal. We have lost the battle against global warming. The summer we are having now is the summer we are going to have from now on. So the only historic aspect of this heat wave is that it is the start of a trend. And this is only the beginning of the devastating aspects that global warming will wreak upon the planet in the years to come.

The media never really waged the battle against global warming in the first place. They have given lip service to global warming, but there has never been an organized campaign in the mainstream media to raise awareness about what will turn out to be the biggest problem of the 21^st century. Like most of the American people they prefer to remain uninformed and assume that someone will come up with a solution.

Well people, no solution has been found and we have turned the corner onto a very warm slippery slope. The one associated story I did hear the other day was that a lot of the corn crop of the country has been wiped out, and that since corn is used to make a lot of other products, there will be an inflationary effect from the heat wave.Get used to that happening too.

In the same manner that you will never hear a story from the mainstream media saying that the standard of living in this country has been permanently lowered by predatory lending and wall street excesses, it will be a long time coming and far too late before anyone in the mainstream media admits that the war on global warming has been lost.

But no mistake about it, we have lost. And every single one of us is to blame, especially the baby boomer generation, because we are the generation presently in power. My generation has given me very little to be proud of.