A dream woke me up last night. Last time a dream that <a href="click here me to write</a> woke me up, I got <a href="click here call from the Capitol POlice</a>.
On the surface, this dream was fairly harmless. The monster wasn't ugly, or horrific, simply an administrator with power to abuse.
In the dream, that woke me up this morning, I took my kids on a little excursion. When I brought them back to school, their principal gave me a very hard time and punished my kids. I asked him, "Why are you doing this?"
He replied, "I'm not a bad guy."
This trickled through my brain for a moment, then, I almost bolted out of bed.
This was a lot of metaphoric imagery about America, the world and our children's future.
The stuff the "principal" is doing is tearing apart the future of constitutional democracy. It is punishing ALL the children. Like boiled frog syndrome, it is creeping upon us and already, people are taking some of the abuses and restrictions on our liberties for granted, accepting them.
This "principal"-- the authority, or power figure-- denies that he's doing anything wrong. Hello!! The right wingers who are selling out freedom and democracy for partisan politics, for corporate interests, all deny that they are doing anything wrong. In fact, they claim they are doing what God wants, what is biblically directed.
Could there be a more evil, a more despicable act or intention than citing God or the Bible to engage in attacks upon freedom and liberty, or to poison and pollute the planet?
I grew up from a fairly young age questioning authority. Today, we live in times when it is essential to question authority, dangerous to simply accept the stories, the explanations, the warnings the "authorities offer. This is a sad situation. In the days of old, in tribal times, those with authority tended to be those who were most wise. Today, power, money and political influence buy 'authority' and anyone would be wise to mistrust such authorities.
Wisdom is no longer a strength, a character asset to be greatly valued or esteemed. On television, we have pundits who are smarmy and connected, who are given tiny sound bytes to give witty replies. Not depth, no time for thought or context or background are permitted. These people are not the wise folk of our time. The true wise folk do not waste their energy on face time on TV, for these two minute jousts with right wing paid puppet mouthpieces.
It has been shown that cultures and civilizations are changed, are literally driven, neurobehaviorally, by their modes of communication, their vehicles for experiencing and transmitting their culture. When the means of communication shifted from story telling around the fire and hieroglyphic images to the first stones carrying cuneiform this changed the world from a female, priestess and Empress dominated right brain culture, with female goddesses to one dominated by left brained, analytical, sequential, hierarchical male dominance.
When the printing press was invented and books and writings could be mass produced, that changed things again and revolutions followed.
When radio and television cascaded upon cultures in fast succession, the world changed again, with cultural explosions and the speed of living and experiencing volcanically erupting all over the planet, spewing a lava of cultural homogeneity that is continuing to this day, often leading to some cultures, those which escaped the earlier touches of the electronic media cultural assault, fighting back, like the Islamists who now call for Sharia law.
And now, we have not television, not movies, but video games as the new biggest, highest ticket form of entertainment. There are tens of millions of kids and adults who no longer read books. They play video games-- on-line, interactive, virtual world, role play video games where the way to success is by gaining wealth, things, power-- and by killing. This is a world where destruction is THE WAY, where split second decisions must be made on who or what to kill, where alliances are made and broken.
We know, that as television has moved from two minute news coverage to three second sound bytes, the way our brains process information has changed. Attention deficit disorder is theorized to be, at least in part, a manifestation of this kind of media patterning. Who knows what the effect of video games will be upon the persona of our culture? Now that video games gross more than movies, one thing is certain, effects upon our culture WILL be produced. They can only grow.
When I taught, as a volunteer, in a fifth grade class, several years ago, part of my responsibility was to read and grade twenty some "novels" the kids had written and illustrated. I found that every boy in the class had written stories that parralleled the video game story pattern of the time-- face challenges, fight, at the end of a time, face a "boss" for that "level" of the story, then move on to the next level, do the same racing through challenges, fighting in minor skirmishes, and then fight the next, bigger and stronger "boss."
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