Freedom — you have to work at it, and you have to pay for it. Literally!
Freedom. Nice. I seem to have some, thanks to my forbears. I love it. But it turns out you have to both work at it and pay for it.
We used to pay for news. We used to pay honest reporters to keep an eye out for corruption, malfeasance, and just plain bad ideas. Honest reporters exposed these evils in institutions, in government, and when warranted in specific individuals. They provided facts they could prove were true. Honest reporters checked their facts and were themselves checked by the organizations behind them. We, in good faith, used facts they gathered as weapons against the evils of our world.
As it happens, those responsible for corruption, money hoarding, malfeasance, and just plain bad ideas like to fight back. They fight with whatever resources they have available: Money, Lawyers, Courts, Legislatures, Investigatory Bodies, Police, Public Relations Offices, Secret Societies, Newspapers, Magazines, and Thugs, to name a few. And get this: they’ve even been known to conspire. They fight back with truth, half-truths, and lies. They fight back by pulling the teeth from effective regulation. They’re not beneath character assassination. They especially like to attack any institution, group, or person capable of bringing them to heel.
So what’s our defense? Awareness primarily. Awareness that pervades the public space and makes the worst behavior so difficult to sustain that the bad folks retreat. They retreat. They do not give up, surrender, or go home for good. If you don’t beat them back by exposing their misdeeds widely, they continue on their merry way. That’s what’s happening today. Public awareness has become so fragmented, so riddled with gaps you can drive a conspiracy through without detection. Not enough of us are paying full attention.
In the past, a significant number of reporters had large organizations behind them. The best of those organizations stood firm, supporting their reporters in the face of threats, intimidation, and violence. Reporters have been and continue to be sued, beaten, or killed. But support for them is running thin. More and more news organizations are making do with less and less. Large numbers of them are gone for good. Others are subsumed into fewer and fewer, larger and larger, national and international corporations, often with well-hidden agendas that have nothing to do with the good of society.
Reporter’s jobs have been disappearing, and with the jobs go their voices. Many of those who remain and their surviving organizations are being attacked as somehow corrupt. Care to guess what happens when they’re ignored or, even worse, not on the job at all?
I’ll tell you. You lose a great deal of protection from dangers you don’t know about. Protection you didn’t know you had. What’s at stake? Your career, your home, the food you eat, the water you drink, your life in some cases. How about your freedom. Stop looking at what’s wrong in the world, or lose the capacity to recognize the wrongs for what they are, and you’ll end up with a lot of wrong being hidden from you. And you’ll be affected whether you’ve made good choices in your own life or not.
I’ve heard it said that it’s all bad news anyway, so why would one bother with it. The answer’s simple. It’s your job as a citizen. If enough of you abandon this work or screw it up by listening to fools and mouthpieces for the corrupt, your nation will fail. In a failed state, chaos will remove the invisible supports for your way of life. You’ll be at actual risk from the four horsemen. If you think I’m exaggerating, read some history. Or read about recent events in places where states have failed.
Steel yourself. I’m about to give you some advice.
Read. Don’t just watch television or surf the internet. Read. And not novels. Read History, Philosophy, Science, Politics, whatever you can sustain an interest in. Read about it.
Pick your sources carefully. There’s a lot of junk out there. I’m not going to help you sort it out. You’ll have to find a way to do that for yourself. Just be advised that there’s enough self-serving nonsense out there to fill your public library ten times over. All of it handsomely bound with convincing cover art and blurbs by famous people.
Subscribe to a few serious publications. A local newspaper (even if they don’t share your politics), A national or regional publication that sponsors or features regular investigative journalism. This will cost you as much as your cable bill. If you’re not footing the bill for serious journalism, it won’t happen.
One last piece of advice: If you never change your mind about anything, you’ve failed. Try again.
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