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OPPOSITE
OF COURAGE
This is from today's
journal notes, based on an email my friend Anne about the great
motivation speaker/writer, Earl Nightingale.
Earl believed the opposite of courage was not cowardliness but
conformity. And conformity is the scourge of today's American society.
Last Tuesday I moderated a community forum on the question of America
going to war against Iraq. There were 100 people there and one of the
most commonly expressed thoughts was that the media have given so much
time to the hawks that those who oppose the war have a hard time getting
heard. As if to prove the point, not one commercial media representative
was there to cover such a vital discussion! If it hadn't been for our
public TV station filming it for later viewing, the speakers would have
all spoken in vain.
While the forum was open to those who support war against Iraq as well
as those who oppose it, I was amazed that every speaker spoke against
it. It was like a cork was pulled out of a bottle of fizz water. People
felt it was their first real chance to be heard.
Town meetings were the backbone of early America. When any issue arose,
people gathered in the town hall and debated it. Today we watch the talk
shows that are too often loaded with "debaters" with
commercial reasons to be there and opinionize.
I am about as sick of commercial television as a person can become and
still keep one of the semi-worthless things in the house. Ownership of
our news outlets is in fewer and fewer hands, being bought up by
mega-conglomerates with no motivation but money. Whatever the current
polls of uninformed Americans show, is where they hammer.
We're making too many decisions from uneducated emotions. To whip up
feelings of patriotism is a lot easier than to whip up the creativity
and brainpower we will need to keep this planet from being ripped apart.
Leaving the issues of the public arena and bringing the
courage/conformity idea to our personal lives, how do we feel about the
way we deal with the issues of our personal lives? When we see an
injustice against a person of a different cultural group, are we as
quick to speak up? Are we pro-people and just pro-our own people?
In Germany, the Nazis whipped up hate against Jews and Gypsies as a
means of mass distraction. They didn't want people to see they were also
going to slaughter and cremate the infirm, homeless, retarded and
mentally ill members of their society. They had to get the hate machine
up to a good speed before they could reveal their evil and sadistic
plans.
The true patriots today are those who are analyzing dangerous national
trends and then speaking out and organizing to reverse them. War may
create jobs but there are no jobs on a dead planet.
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