Opinion/Editorial
THE COLD ELECTRIC UNIVERSE
The modern era opened with electronic communication. The telephone came into its own when everyone got one, privacy became assured, and the price allowed for heavy usage. Television entered at about the same time, but only after the owners and operators came to understand that it was a broadcast medium and not some vehicle required to be responsive to the audience. The telephone morphed into the cellphone and television home entertainment systems. Somewhere, sociologically, the intensity of information passing between and among us leached out identification, accountability, and even reality.
We slipped into a cultural wasteland of less and less real contact. We fell from the necessity of our word being good to any word being anything, without ‘good’ even being factored in.
We arrived at a time where there is no responsibility for being human. The very definition of what a human being is has become blurred. The Internet came along to allow for almost universal access to all available information. Except the information is not always true. The information is often in error. But the information, whether truly in error or otherwise, is taken as true. We have Facebook as a huge social contact site. But most people don’t use their real faces on the site. They substitute, for supposed privacy reasons, but in truth, they do so because they are afraid to be held accountable for anything. That fear is unnecessary because of the lack of any authority to make things painfully accountable.
The facts support an almost total lack of accountability. The more remote contact we experience the less accountable we are held. The current crop of presidential hopefuls illustrates this quite effectively. The candidates can espouse whatever beliefs they feel necessary to convince an audience to support them. They can then change the belief system presentation completely and deny they ever believed, or espoused belief in, their previous position to the next audience. There is no authority to stop them from doing this. Dick Cheney, when he was vice president became a master in understanding this phenomenon and started a trend. That trend is used to this day on national television.
The war in Iraq was not a mistake and the lack of weapons of mass destruction is still talked about, he used, as the candidates today still use, this newfound understanding of what remote communications can cause. Cheney mastered the actions of denying things he’d said while the videos of him saying those things were being played on national television. Now, through time, academician America has been marginalized, the United States government is not trusted in the least, and our mass media has come only to care about ratings. Only the public notices and cares, but it is rendered powerless by its totally fragmented, purposely divided, and without any means of organization. Lies, prevarication, and deliberate misinformation pervade our communication systems across the board.
The great thieves of our time remain unnamed. The robber barons of the late eighteen hundreds were legends and known by all. Carnegie. Westinghouse, Mellon, and Rockefeller, to name a few. Their sins were at least revealed by the media of the time, although forgiven by a culture wherein profitable capitalism is celebrated, no matter how crooked the origin of its success. Today, more than a hundred years later, we don’t even know the names of our robber barons. They run our largest banks and energy companies. They are interviewed but their names are never used in conjunction with what they’ve done. Today, with instant communication we have instant unseen forgiveness and instant unknowing acceptance.
The forces of evil abound across the land in mystical anonymity. The individuals powering those forces, given a recent leg-up by the ratification that private and public organizations are ‘persons,’ submerge themselves behind anonymous contributors, chief executive officers, boards of directors, and partners. They pass in front of us faceless, their anonymity and lack of causal attachment thereby leeching vital life’s blood from the very soul of this Country’s very soul.
