THE FORLORN HOPE

Op/Ed By J. Strauss

 

In combat times in days gone by there used to be situations where men were called upon to lead hopeless charges against overwhelming or deeply dug in enemies.  The chances of surviving or coming out undamaged under such circumstances were very slight.  Yet, in order to achieve the fame of wearing a small specially designed piece of cloth worn on their uniforms led volunteers to be many and varied.  The reward for survival and or continuance of service following credible performance was to be honored as being a person especially courageous and expressively patriotic.

What has happened to our cultures, wherein men and women do not step forward to take risks unless those risks are carefully measured beforehand, and thereby diminished or the risks are bogus but portrayed as being real.

Combat is one thing, and there have been plenty of stories appearing at the top of the media food chain lately about men claiming combat experience they don’t have or didn’t experience.  But combat is not where most of all humanity lives and breathes. Actually physical combat is uncommon, although it does not seem so simply because modern news organizations have very little to do with reporting reality or properly according history.

What is much more common is social tribal life lived at the most local of levels.

Where are the people coming forward today to gird themselves and then walk bravely into social danger, facing the possibility of real dangers of tribal expulsion, exclusion or even legality?  Political correctness has overcome the American culture like a calmly quiet wave of invisible but cloying gas.  To pick up what were once normal established newspapers, to watch cable and network television news shows and even to regularly read successful Internet blogs and news presentations is to watch a grand, nearly universal, rolling reticence of risk.  The observing and reporting on actual circumstance has taken a very distant back seat to the reporting of the fame and fortune of the people supposedly affecting us with their performance.  But the performance receives such low billing and such inaccurate coverage that truth has become something acceptably accommodated as relative.

America goes to war in Iraq without any truth to why it went to war, yet the acts committed in that unjust awful war are never admitted to be relevant because it was, after all, a war.  The truth is almost never presented in displaying easily available facts about how America is anything but a welfare state.  Entitlements owed to all the people who contributed to make then entitlements instead of assistance or welfare are portrayed as being monetary payments to weak, old and injured people.  Torture is denied by the use of cowardly words meant to do nothing other than permit such inhuman acts.  The modern media supports, by simply reporting what they construe or define to be the “facts” almost any behavior not directly opposed by an overwhelming resistance of the population.  The resistance to almost any behavior of the large companies or the government however, cannot and will never arise because a simple media reporting of the salient “facts” does not allow for them to gather to protest.  The modern mass media, while proclaiming that they have no investment and no opinion other than to report the facts, do no such thing.  The mere choice of what facts to cover, report on or produce are opinions just as materially forceful as Op/Eds or editorials.

Until such times as America can recover from the manipulative beating it has taken by most of mass media there can be no rational response from a caring feeling public.  It is only through the admission that all facts are, at their foundations, opinion can truth be arrived at by a watching, reading and listening public.  The few news personalities who are reporting in that way, rising high enough in popularity (read; noticed by the public in general), are constantly investigated, attacked and derided for their work.  These small voices, hoping to change the shape of a distant public mental beach by their small lapping voices are the forlorn hope of today. They wage a continuing struggle for notice, value and any kind of understanding at all.  The truth is something rarely told about oneself.  The truth is something told about others or what others are doing.  By definition, that means the truth will always be something that only can be arrived at through a painful high threat process.

The Forlorn Hope of the media today are a small damaged and high mortality number, just like their forebears who went into the breach against hopeless odds, with those surviving only receiving a small token of little worth but also a great reward of personal human satisfaction.

 

 

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