| February 17, 2006 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth Know
News is Good News
We finally started getting the newspaper out here. It arrives a few days late, if at all, but it’s a start. The principal warned me to take the papers directly to the classroom because “the students will leave them all over the hall.” Maybe I should post sections of the paper on the school’s bulletin board. Shouldn’t students know that they are not the only ones whose water lines are freezing; that in other rural towns sewage is also bubbling up through bathtub drains? How many kids know that Bush wants to cut a federal subsidy that helps pay rural water costs in Alaska? No connection. When I asked students the other day why the U.S. is fighting a war against Iraq, they gave an unequivocal response: “they’re terrorists.” “They bombed New York. It was Saddam Hussein,” a student informed me. I asked where he got his information. “From CNN, just like everyone else does around here,” he said. I wonder if, as well, they are getting their ideas about the world from other teachers in the school, like the math teacher who still has her doorway framed with military promotional photos (oddly juxtaposed below a sign that says “kindness begets kindness.”) If you’re looking for a source of this collective ignorance, look no farther than the free market media that delivers news in the form of a convenience store junk food rack. As folksinger Ani DiFranco suggests, in To The Teeth, “open fire on Hollywood, open fire on MTV, open fire on NBC and CBS and ABC ... and all the lies they told us along the way.” Teachers, college students, law professors, writers, artists and the like are complicit in their uncritical consumption of news media’s nonsense. Behind every story, there is a deeper story, and a deeper history, of course. The least we can do is “slide into the flow of the morning paper,” as poet Billy Collins recommends. Or we can compulsively watch documentaries that blow the lid off the quivering pot, ones such as The Revolution Will Not be Televised, which exposes a coup attempt, delivered by private news media, against Hugo Chavez’s government. My friend Paul, an activist, once told me, “every day I read or hear something that just shocks the hell out of me.” Unlike our children and unlike their teachers, lawyers, doctors, and tire sales clerks, though, Paul knows. Some of the elders here know it, too. I asked a 70-year-old about changes in the weather, since a warm spell just turned the landscape from frozen ice to tundra. He shook his head at the thought of global warming. “You know, an old friend used to tell me, whatever the white man has laid his hands on ... he’s fucked it up!” He broke into a long laugh, leaning over and slapping his thigh. “Yes,” I told him, grinning. “I know.” Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. |
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Reserved. in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership. |
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