A Day in the Life of...

How does one convey to others the loss one feels when the other person may not have ever experienced what you have? It seems to me that each succeeding generation will become poorer in many ways than the previous generation. This poverty especially applies to finite resources such as fisheries, land, water, and clean air, since a finite supply of anything divided by a growing population converges to zero at some point thereby causing the population to crash if that supply is food or water. But what about the intangibles like ethics and people? How does one tell another how much Walter Cronkite, Eric Servareid, or Jules Bergman, meant to him or her? How we've lost not only the people, but the trade they practiced. Lion Calandra has one nice Cronkite editorial, while Frank Rich has another entitled, And That’s Not the Way It Is. Here is Walter Cronkite's goodbye. Eric Sevareid's eloquent and emotional farewell is almost unparalleled even today, and people today would seldom hear such a speech by any journalist or public speaker. I miss those men and their colleagues. Very few journalists have the courage to speak truth to power these days. Most are just mouthpieces and cheerleaders for the government and corporate spin machines. It's rather scary how the future is turning out. It's part 1984 and part Rollerball, - corporate control and hegemony with the government as a mouthpiece, facade, and enabler. I'd include Fahrenheit 451, but who needs to burn books when you can digitize all of them, and then censor or delete the digital copies from the server or database it resides on. If some computer scientists have their way, future children won't have to read or write because a computer will tell them what they want to know, or a machine will write their essays for them. Then people really will be sheeple from cradle to grave.

Labels: ode to real journalists