How You Can Change America in Five Simple Steps

How You Can Change America
in Five Simple Steps
Bill Bekkenhuis
September 5, 2010

1 Become selectively and creatively unhappy about things.

We recognize the great good in America despite its serious flaws. Hating everything will paralyze our ethics and make us bores at cocktail parties. So we pick and choose where to focus our efforts. We allow our unhappiness about the state of the world to trigger a creative response to whatever portion of America's problems, large or small, we're capable of putting on our plates rather than falling prey to apathy, silence, conformity, scapegoating and complicity.

2 Insist on quality information.

Everything – and I mean everything – in the media is designed first and foremost to entertain us and sell us something and only secondarily designed to inform us, to teach us to think critically or to encourage us to become better and more humane people. So we intentionally choose which media sources we allow to direct our attention and to inform our participation in the great national conversation.

3 Commit to producing true value and consuming true value.

A life-affirming culture, economics and civil society cannot be built on a foundation of garbage. Much of what we uncritically accept as value has been force-fed to us by the media in its promotion of consumerism. So we thoughtfully consider every investment of our time, our talents and our money as votes for the values America should embody. In America, we vote every day, not just on Election Day, for our security, our food, our health care, our education, our housing, our arts and music, and our economic opportunities - for ourselves, our families and our communities.

4 Reach out to others with respect and charity.

Having begun the process of getting our own lives realigned with what we thoughtfully and intentionally determine to be of true value, we reach out to and enlist our family, friends, neighbors and co-workers as allies. We photocopy and distribute this message to those who are interested. We admire and emulate those with greater commitment than our own, we are patient with those with a lesser commitment than our own and we seek the positive intent behind the thinking of those with a different commitment from our own. We organize potlucks and discussion groups using the best articles, books and DVDs we can find. We help build stronger neighborhoods and communities.

5 Invest in like-minded voluntary associations.

Voluntary associations are the mediating institutions between individuals and the Powers That Be. We invest our time, talent and money to support those institutions we determine to be aligned, however imperfectly, with our values knowing that groups working together to share information and values and to deliver the money and votes that come from large organizations can change things in America.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: There is no more information. This is the program. What we do with it is up to us.

How I Spent (and What I Learned on) My Summer Vacation

How I Spent (and What I Learned on) My Summer Vacation

One of the challenges of unemployment is the question of how to take a quality vacation. First, you have no money. Second, it's hard to be sure what you are taking a vacation from.

I took two "staycations" this summer. One was at Musikfest (a week-long, annual music and beer festival in Bethlehem, PA).

I had a great time and listened to a great deal of music: probably more than I had ever experienced in any other Musikfest.

But I also noticed an out-of-character behavior I had developed. Each evening, I'd carefully review the next day's acts at the various venues, plan my itinerary and then doggedly (if not always successfully) pursue it – even if I didn't particularly feel like it.

In short, for God alone knows what reason, I began turning it into a job substitute.

Apparently, five months into unemployment, I'm experiencing the need to be someplace each day.

When I begin the active part of the job search (most of my preparation is done), immediately following labor day, hopefully that will work for me.

My second "staycation" was a week-long house-and-dog sitting job at my friends' home which had, along with a number of other wonderful amenities (such as a built-in pool and jacuzzi) a flat screen TV the size of an aircraft carrier's flight deck complete with various remotes and hundreds of cable channels and stored movies.

It took two pages of technical documentation for me to use a bare minimum of its features.

We do not have cable in my house. We have a TV and DVD player. And a radio tuned to NPR. And a computer with a dial-up connection communicating using CSC (Can-String-Can) protocol.

So I brought along books and writing I wished to accomplish and personal development tapes to listen to and... plunked myself down in front of the TV and scarcely moved for the next week other than to let dogs in or out and to feed us.

I even kept it on while I slept. (I apparently have more difficulty being alone than I realized.)

So, it was a seven day total immersion experience.

Oddly enough, it was probably a wise use of my time. It confirmed a great deal of what I already believed and exposed me to some new stuff.

First, it was quite obvious that everything on TV is created to sell the viewer something. In the case of advertisements, they are attempting to sell you products and services. In the case of everything else they are attempting to sell you on continuing to watch their channel thereby driving up the value of the advertising "space" they sell.

When you think about it, whether they are selling you goods, services or entertainment, what they are actually selling you is a culture, an ethic and a lifestyle.

So, while any particular program may, ostensibly, entertain or edify or inform there really is only one genre on television and that is persuasion: to persuade us to buy the advertised goods and services and to persuade us to keep watching that channel. And to persuade us to buy the lifestyles implied by each.

Basically, it's all infomercial.

This is a learning that, hopefully, will cause me to my critically evaluate my internet consumption as I am sure the same dynamic applies as one gathers all this neat, "free" (if sometimes questionable) information available on advertiser-sponsored web pages.

This is not to say there aren't qualitative differences.

Horton Hears a Who, Adam (story of a young adult with Asperger's), Food, Inc. (criticizing America's food industry), and the astonishing, Up (what the heck is that animation? – it certainly is not a children's story) were movies that were, in my opinion, quite well done and worth the time spent.

Another new discovery was Disney Channel's cartoon series, Phineas and Ferb. That impressed me so much I ordered two DVDs. (Why is it the best freakin', highest-quality stuff on TV is geared towards children? The worst trash is reserved for the rest of us. Maybe children are more discerning.)

Following my news addiction did not lead to such fruitful finds.

I had hoped to give FOX News a chance but the very first story I heard them report on was distorted. (I had already seen the story on CNN and MSNBC about how the farms involved in the tainted eggs had a history of various violations going back to the early '90s – FOX reported the same story only mentioning the violations that occurred during the Obama administration. BUZZ! Sorry, FOX, thank you for playing. One nice thing about freedom of the press – you get to choose your poison.)

Finally being able to watch The Daily Show and The Cobert Report I decided that they, along with MSNBC and CNN, are basically variations on the same theme: entertainment cloaked as news programs. I just found The Daily Show and The Cobert Report more entertaining.

I suppose that was one of my significant learning experiences of the week. It isn't so much that CNN leans center and MSNBC leans left and FOX leans right (if I may indulge in a bit of understatement) as much as it is that all three news networks are primarily entertainment.

The folks that did the movie, Network nailed the direction "the news" was going.

There was some upside.

First, my two lingering reminders of what network news used to be like in the days of an Edward R. Murrow or a Walter Cronkite was the News Hour with Jim Lehr and the BBC World News, both presented on public broadcasting.

If I had cable, I'd watch those and probably no other news services.

And cable TV News – even on CNN and MSNBC - is good at presenting visual news: in this case, the flooding and terrible conditions in Pakistan as well as the retrospectives and progress reports on New Orleans during and after Katrina. I had been following those stories on NPR but my imagination failed to grasp the reality portrayed by the photojournalists.

But, bottom line, if one considers the "density" of the news as the amount of factual information, analysis and expert opinion over time spent viewing, reading or listening to it, I'd have to say that NPR (on the radio) and the web pages for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, PBS and the BBC take the prize (along with other big city newspapers such as The LA Times, The Times-Picayune or The St. Petersburg Times).

As far as shows such as Keith Olbermann (as well as the whole conservative menagerie and freak show on FOX which I didn't even sniff at), I consider them pretty much garbage.

So there are two important things I learned on my two summer vacations.

The first is, in a capitalist society, everything is for sale and everyone is trying to sell you something. And I'm okay with that. But we need to realize it and evaluate the various offers critically and intentionally.

The second thing is that there's a lot of value out there in our media-driven culture and society for not a whole lot of money (for example, most of the music at Musikfest and most of the information on the internet is free) but there is also a lot of crap and garbage – and some of that crap and garbage serves as an addictive narcotic that is actually quite expensive, over the long run, in time and money and moral sensitivity.

Let the buyer beware.