Raffi
Raffi is a singer, songwriter and acclaimed children's entertainer. His 20 years of family entertainment resulted in numerous "gold" and "platinum" awards and over 1.5 million books sold. He has been honored by Parents' Choice Awards and The Order of Canada. His work on ecology advocacy earned him the U.N.'s Earth Achievement and Global 500 Awards.
I had been a media hound for years, a keen observer of socio-political events with a need to keep up with what's happening in Canada, the US, and in the world at large. After both my parents passed into spirit in October of 1995, I gave myself a retreat that spawned new reflections on media, particularly as it relates to the ecology of children and the very notion of a sustainable society.
On an island off Canada's west coast, I tuned into the natural
dynamics of my environment, that timeless reality. I felt the rhythm of
the day's passing light, stoking the fire in the wood stove, watching
the play of tides on the bay, hearing the fray of emotions within - I
put the world on hold.
I found myself not wanting to buy the
newspaper or turn on the TV, the Radio and CD player. Uninterrupted by
random voices and images, I came to feel an expanding inner self. With
my attention not spread so thin, the immediate world became very
important. The tranquil beauty of the bay and the tree-clean island air
- became dear to me. My interiors were expanding. When I returned to
the city I didn't need to turn on the car radio for company. My life
felt complete without it.
I pretended that I already had all the information I needed, at least
the kind I was likely to get from commercial media. I was still reading
all sorts of books, but something had shifted. I felt a sense of
contentment, of having enough; and that fullness, now in the forefront
of my being, didn't want or need the intrusions of outside stimuli.
I wanted this new feeling to last. I noticed how much time I had
gained. I noticed the absence of jarring news items, some gruesome
murder, another child abduction nearby, a civil war, or other horror
story - and how this absence allowed the day a clean start to unfolding
possibilities. Less need to react, more time to initiate.
I was still getting "news", of an airplane crash or the Republican
party's presidential nominee, but now, by way of friends, not media.
I'm not unaware of the irony that these people probably got their news
from the media. It is enough to make the distinction of how different
life felt now, how present I felt. I had stepped out of a steady diet
of media distraction, and thrown light on a habit that, in retrospect,
had all the signs of an addiction. The constant multimedia channel
surfing - "remote" hoarding of inane imagery, the mind's constant
chatter wrapped in every day's newspaper - had ceased.
This disengagement brought other changes: very few commercial messages
crossed my path; the shopping impulse, already low, lessened; I was
comparing myself less to others; less mental and emotional energy spent
on faraway stories that had little to do with me and that I could do
nothing about. People in my immediate life took center stage.
Media sells news, pushing events to the edge to get attention, to make
money. The lengths that corporations and entertainment companies go to
maximize profits, outdoing each other to win the greatest audience in a
marketplace of expanding user options and shrinking loyalties, makes
the use of sensationalism compelling if not inevitable. Contrive a
crisis, stir up controversy.
"Crisis-casting" is bad news: it spins everything into discord and
scandal. If producers of news programs fiscally favor "disaster" over
good news, outrage over comfort, and conflict over peace, their very
preferences fabricate a self-fulfilling and distorted world that dances
in the minds and hearts of the people they reach.
A loud "ambient noise" obscures and impairs mature understanding of the
signs of our times, the ones deemed "not sexy", like the loss of global
biodiversity, and ecosystems at risk. Our high-fat media diet creates a
"virtual" reality, a giant negative feedback loop expanding and feeding
on itself. Life as performance, relationship as marketing, a
techno-babble melodrama where time and complexity are compressed into a
numbing tedium of pseudo-crises and shopping solutions. Against this
backdrop, consider the ecology of the child. Consider the magical child
turned TV-junkie at an early age, and the wanton theft of imagination
from this young child's life. Add junk food, trash music, and parents
who are not home all week; throw in a gaudy Christmas season, and watch
a vacancy grow - into a grounded, caring, exemplary citizen? By which
means? You've got an obsessive neurotic with much to undo, lost in a
sea of trivia-miles from the shore, restless, homeless. And all the
schools and jails in the world won't put this broken seed back together
again.