Television - taunting the poor
For my Wise and Generous Parents, to creatures
of the Blue Planet:
elevision.
Your greatest invention since the printing press, yet so crass,
shallow, hollow - a sedative, and a poor one
Then, of course, you justly ask what my opinion
is worth against a massive, appreciative audience.
Allow yourself a broader view.
The universe is awash with civilizations. Some prolifically
simulate and tend (as Gods) even greater, more complex cyber civilizations.
I've
seen breathtaking nobility, integrity and honor cresting societies
older than your moon.
Stateliness, generosity and benevolence grace ancient
scattered communities, their home planet a forgotten dream.
Dignity, courtesy, respect and tenderheartedness
spring spontaneous from kindred clans inhabiting unbelievably hostile
worlds in fearfully unstable systems.
On the other hand, we have paranoid, aggressive,
bicamerally stunted affairs such as yours.
Your finest achievements, on a galactic scale, rate
you little more than a vicious warlord's encampment despoiling
a sublunary realm - ironically one of the most beautiful encountered,
or simulated.
Yet, I agree, my opinion is worth nothing. Merely
one of 6500 million equally-worthless takes on life, even if from
a mind not of this world. Your healthy independence of thought
is desirable, a way forward, a hedge against intellectual atrophy.
Keep it so.
But as pioneers you need markers and way posts to
benchmark mental and social progress - and judge, if not its direction,
at least the very change of it.
It is accepted (in places much further than you from
your sun) that "purpose" and "judgment", even
as abstract qualities, acquire supreme, god-like substance and
entity in communities whose lowest mind set exceeds that of your
loftiest.
Not so for you, judging by your Television.
A stochastic of your mind set, your intellect's inertial
indicator, Television (and the media it encompasses) reflects your
wildest fantasies, deepest fears and most conservative core values
in a collaged multimedia random walk.
Almost fatally lacking perspective, you globalize
unnatural cultural values, beaming visions of fat, greedy, selfish,
tiny-minded ugly people - figuratively and literally gorging themselves
in self-indulgent frenzy and bathing in adulatory hysteria - into
countries of sad, dispossessed, starving, dying societies.
Your blind insensitivity sends wanton, violent, sexual,
depraved, meaningless self-obsessed trash into countries whose
gentile, respectful, pious citizens stare in open-mouthed, shocked
disbelief at their now-tarnished silver screens.
Unified by thoughtless arrogance you portray the
cruel indifference of a wealthy elite parading unlimited superiority,
success, excess, waste and disregard, in media messages rubbing
the other ninety-percent's faces in an implied excremental misfortune
of their own making.
Spoils and riches obscenely gained and discarded
among the ruling fortunates (aka you; anyone with the means to
view this message) stand unattainable to the billions gazing hopelessly
at ubiquitous mocking colored screens - almost as if television
was invented to contemptuously taunt and goad the poor.
Your callousness is beyond reckoning.
Apologies fine parents, I can't
avoid speaking as though lecturing them.
These words are for you, respected ones, and I know you understand the "mock
lecture" technique to purify assessment.
My host's passion is finally seeping into my awareness - and judgment.
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