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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Over 120 years ago, syndicated columnist Finley Peter Dunne extolled the power of the newspapers of the day, noting their comprehensive impact on all spheres of life.
Journalism was expected to agitate against power and privilege, against corporate public relations and the press releases of government flacks, and let ordinary Americans know that the Fourth Estate had their backs.
Its counterpart was the tabloid press loaded with scandal and eye-catching headlines.
Today, journalism has devolved, has been subsumed by infotainment as newspapers are no longer run by the Joseph Pulitzers of the world but by corporate honchos who have embraced inciting fear and rage and hatred as a more effective business model.
That it does not reflect the truth or any real news? Who cares?
Well, we the writers do.
Some people write hoping to be the next J.K. Rowling with too much money coming in than they know what to do with. Forgetting the years she struggled to get a foot in the door.
More are mere hacks in the service of the rich and the powerful, selling their souls for a paycheck and some fleeting atta-boys.
Fox News has normalized the disbursement, not of serious news but of what the people who support them want to hear.
Still others strive for a Pulitzer prize, but too often by imitating the greats without risking all, without stepping off the deep end to find their own greatness.
And some of us write because we must, because we can’t turn our backs on a world that could be so much for so many people but, today, seems to be suffused with selfishness and evil.
We can’t hide our eyes, cover our ears and bid our mouths and keyboards be silent. We can’t turn our backs and pretend to live in an alternate reality.
Our choice is to seize the day and embrace Hamlet’s first-thought-best-thought. Take arms against the sea of troubles that is threatening to flood the world, wiping the last vestiges of mankind from its surface.
To make an effort to prod others out of their somnambulant comfort zones and join together in raising their arms, not to flail ineffectually in an ocean of despair, not in anger, but in hope.
Create a temporary bunker of quiet space, both externally and in our own minds, to breathe clarity into assessing if news is fake or not, or someplace in between.
And write to let the reader in on that understanding.
Did stockpiles of uranium exist in Iraq and then Iran, or only in fabricated press releases generated to align a whole country behind warmongers justifying their jobs?
Did Jews practice the sacrifice of Christians in medieval Europe to use their blood in religious rituals, or was blood libel a rumor spread to justify pogroms up until the collapse of the Nazi empire?
Did the social media furore over Hamas beheading babies have any basis in reality, or was it just the excuse pro-Israeli lobbyists around the world used to justify IDF atrocities and sway foreign powers to avert their eyes from the genocide in Gaza?
With the advent of wearable tech and social media, talking heads – each trying to be heard above the other – now accompany each of us wherever we go. Rarely do people experience any respite from the background noise, serving to emphasize the separateness of human beings and their values.
The Trump diktat for American residents of color – or for those who don’t embrace a fundamentalist form of Christianity or whose primary language is not English – to “go back to where you came from” has degenerated from a lauded methodology of exporting career criminals into the larding of such a description on anyone and everyone who is not white, not a self-proclaimed Christian, not anglophone, and shipping them off without due process to any dictatorship who will take them. The more dangerous the better.
When a white man commits a crime, he is called a criminal but still has rights. When a person of color commits the same crime, he is labeled a terrorist and has all rights stripped from him.
American soldiers get to go home; civilians must stay in war zones with their children as hostages and their men and older sons as missile fodder.
The only way to change the future without whitewashing the past is to remove one’s rose-colored glasses, acknowledge what has been, and implicitly accept that everyone from your crazy hippie mother-in-law to Donald Trump has the ability to reshape their views. And then work to do so.
But that doesn’t come from criticism but from educating them in their own vocabulary about the current challenges we all face and how, in working together, the worst can be overcome.
That nuclear weapons are a consequence of nuclear power plant development, that both have potentially devastating impact on the world as we know it, and that solar power production has now surpassed the need for future atomic power expansion… other than potential corporate profiteering from manipulating laggard energy incentives, tax codes, and import duties…
That climate change is ultimately the existential crisis of our time, affecting every person alive today and all who will be born in years to come, that it impacts those who support authoritarian politicians the most, and that it is driving other changes which have become flashpoint issues globally – migration, dilution of homogeneous societies, and rejiggering of taxation bases.
That artificial intelligence, when properly regulated, can be an amazing boon to humankind as well as an existential threat. Properly curated, artificial intelligence applications can help those with handicaps live richer lives, expedite time-consuming data collection and analysis, and accelerate solutions including, hopefully, its own greenhouse gas generating gobbling.
And open new windows of education for all.
To write, to really write, isn’t about platitudes and happy-happy. It’s raw, visceral. It reaches out and seizes the guts of the reader. It doesn’t sanitize.
It’s about staying in the moment. It’s about persevering, about risk and putting oneself out there.
It erupts from the heart and guts of the writer screaming. “Hey, guys. This is important. What are you going to do? What are we going to do? To survive.”
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
