Both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley imagined an eerie
dystopian future, where democracy would be destroyed
because citizens did not remember their own history. Huxley's
vision in Brave New World involved a nation so entranced
with diversion-seeking that its people voluntarily gave up
democracy in favor of hypnotically sucking the pacifier of
non-stop entertainment.
Today, television pundits urge people to move from one news
event to another at warp speed. We are not even supposed
to remember history that happened as recently as a few
weeks ago.
For example, the public barely began to digest the fact that
thousands of voters complained of voting irregularities in
Florida. Before we could assimilate that piece of information
and respond intelligently, TV talking heads and politicians
badgered us to forget that story and focus on the "newer"
news—that of giddily embracing a Bush presidency.
Neil Postman laments the "present-centered" nature of
television news in his classic Amusing Ourselves to Death.
He says, "Tyrants of all varieties have always known the
value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of
pacifying discontent."
Television news, says Postman, helps render people unfit to
remember. He adds that, by contrast, remembering history
gives us necessary context—"something within which facts
can be organized and patterns discerned."
Postman quotes journalist Bill Moyers, "I worry that my own
business helps to make this an anxious age of agitated
amnesiacs. We Americans seem to know everything about
the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty
centuries or the last sixty years."
Here are some important historical facts to remember, in
order to put recent political events into context: The
American people—the generations alive today—have been
handed an extraordinary opportunity. Our ancestors bled and
died so that we might self-govern by electing representatives
and then holding those representatives accountable. Third
world nations do not have that same opportunity.
The electorate, we average Americans, are the parents—not
the children—of our government. When TV talking heads
and political leaders speak about "giving" civil-rights
advocates a voice, or, for example, not "allowing" a Jesse
Jackson to challenge Florida's voting irregularities, those
leaders assume a parental role. Civil liberties advocates are
not the children of media pundits or politicians.
Pundits and politicians do not "give" the public a voice. As
Donaldo Macedo writes in Literacies of Power, that voice is
not a gift. It is both a human right and a democratic right. It is
a right won after our ancestors sweated and struggled long
and hard, and it was finally enacted into law. However, laws
that support civil liberties are fragile in the hands of political
leaders who think that they are the parents, and that the
majority of Americans are their children.
Macedo, a professor at the University of Massachusetts,
Boston, talks about political leaders' antidemocratic efforts to
sanitize public discourse and keep the public
unknowledgeable about important political realities—a
process he calls "stupidification." He says when political
leaders tell civil liberties advocates to use less strident terms
in describing human rights violations, they are asking them to
"bleach" the subject of meaning. The request for "gracious"
discourse is often a thinly disguised plea for verbal
whitewashing.
Macedo adds that it is dangerous for the public to pretend
that empty slogans such as "freedom," "liberty," "equality,"
and "democracy" are realities already fully won. If we falsely
believe we have attained those ideals, we neglect the fact that
winning them is an ongoing battle.
When the civil rights of one group of Americans are violated,
it injures us all. Historian Howard Zinn writes about the
southern abolitionist Angelina Grimke whose fellow
abolitionists said they should not promote sexual equality
because "it was so outrageous to the common mind that it
would hurt the campaign for the abolition of slavery."
Grimke responded: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward
with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of
the road . . . If we surrender the right to speak in public this
year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and
the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can
woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of
man and shamed into silence?"
What can a nation of children do for fellow Americans whose
voting rights were violated if we stay (some of us voluntarily)
subservient to parental media pundits and paternal political
leaders? In The Sibling Society, Robert Bly uses the word
"sibling" as a metaphor for adults who are not fully grown up.
Siblings, says Bly, have no interest in history, and no concern
for those less fortunate than themselves. They do not
participate in their own political system. Bly asks why such
large numbers of Americans choose to remain children,
saying, "Serious participation in politics is at an all-time low;
Congress allows corporations to meet air quality standards
by lowering the standards. We are always under commercial
pressure to slide backward, toward adolescence, toward
childhood."
It is not in the best interest of average citizens to choose
amnesia and eternal childhood over remembering history and
actively participating, as mature adults would, in our nation's
political life. Yes, we are all busy, and at times it appears our
lives revolve only around making money and attending to only
our own immediate concerns. However, focusing only on our
personal lives and failing to put current events into historical
context are the very behaviors that make us a nation of
children and a nation of amnesiacs.
We have been instructed by media pundits and certain
politics leaders to forget what happened in Florida and to
blindly suck the newest media pacifier—namely, the
upcoming Bush inauguration extravaganza. What should we
graciously suggest our paternalistic leaders to do with that
pacifier instead?
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