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What Needs To Go Right by Bill Sharon

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08/11/08 From The Head To The Heart by Bill Sharon

My first exposure to the media was the Army/McCarthy hearings in 1954; I remember because the gavel to gavel coverage interrupted my seeing the Hopalong Cassidy and Lash LaRue cowboy serials that I watched every day after school.  I was seven.  Senator Joe McCarthy, the virulent anti-communist who ruined scores of careers and lives, was being investigated by his own committee for attempting to get the army to provide preferential treatment for a former aide.  My recollection of Joseph Welsh, the Special Counsel to the committee, shaming McCarthy for his demagoguery is probably colored by seeing film of the hearings when I was older but my memory of my father’s reaction is still very clear.  A staunch Republican, he was upset in a way that I had not seen before.  It was my first experience of how information communicated through a television could have a profound impact.

 

Over the next decade, television increasingly became the source for news in my life.  Through it I witnessed the aftermaths of the assassinations of the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King and I saw a man walking on the moon.  But the report that changed me in the way that my father was changed was Cronkite’s February 1968 report following the Tet offensive in which he told us that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.  Something had changed; some sense of our own righteousness had been challenged in the establishment media, not just on the college campus.  Later, the Watergate scandal convinced many that the corruption was deeper than a flawed world view; that it was contained in the cynicism of our leaders toward their own people. 

 

As many of us moved into the business world and some to Wall Street, the news almost became a caricature of itself.  Every administration had a new “gate” scandal and outrage gave way to posturing.  These events became a confirmation of a view that government had become irrelevant and venal and a servant of a constituency that was clearly not aligned with the needs of its citizens.  But no event, no matter how outrageous, seemed capable of galvanizing the population to demand real change.  It was as though we were so jaded that we no longer cared.  As Pogo would say “we have seen the enemy and he is us.”

 

The advent of cable news in 1980 expanded coverage and presented the opportunity for more in-depth reporting, but over the past two decades it has degenerated into a series of white Bronco chases and contentious so-called experts talking past each other.  Recently it has taken on the air of the World Wide Wresting Federation – anchors from different networks ridicule each other to the point where the only thing that is missing are the ring card girls.  There is precious little information in any of these outlets to inform us about what is really going on in the world.

 

And then came the Internet.  The major media outlets have adapted and we can read, listen and watch the same content there that we find on television and radio and in the press.  But more importantly, all of us have come to the Internet.  Millions of people are creating audio and video content every day.  The amount is staggering, the information ranges from nonsensical to profound.  It seems an overwhelming task to separate the wheat from the chaff.  How can we know where to look to find what we need to know?

 

Something I saw on a short video clip the other day may give us a hint.  It was Bruce Lipton, a biologist and an extraordinarily brilliant man discussing how the 50 trillion cells in our body function cooperatively without any higher authority to direct them.  These cells know exactly what to do.  They keep the heart pumping and the lungs expanding and contracting and they ensure that we can put one foot in front of the other.  How they do this comes from an adaptive ability, a knowing what to do that is on a scale unlike anything we can imagine.

 

We are in a time where we are learning to live from the heart, not the head.  I can’t tell you what a long road a middle aged white man who saw himself as the master of his own destiny had to travel to make that statement.  If you are one and reading this then perhaps you know; if not, you’ll have to take my word for it.  It seems clear to me that more and more of us are traveling the same road – moving in concert, acting without anticipating an outcome, understanding something we can’t quite put into words

 

We are all still stuck with the language of the head – our five senses and our emotions.  We have no language yet to describe where we are going.  Logic fails us; we only have our intuition.  It is intuition that caused you to read this, it is intuition that will propel you to the next validation you need to experience, it is intuition that will remind you of what you already know.

ATTENTION!

It has been brought to our attention that Margaret is being portrayed as a psychic on $1.99 sites. These sites are doing so without Margaret's permission. Margaret has not claimed she is a psychic. - MW