Walking Blind

You see what you want to see. If you can't make sense of what you see, your brain alters what you see until you can.

The media provides you with what you want to see, and that is all. If you want to see Iraq as a success of terrific proportions, look around. There are pictures and stories to back up your belief. If you believe that Iraq is a quagmire and a failure, there are pictures and stories to back that up to. In today's world, nothing is anything anymore. There is no black and white. There is no good, although there is most certainly evil.

Throughout it all, we are all essentially walking blind. Our eyes and ears outside our body don't show us the raw truth anymore, they show us what we want to see. That is how they make their money... by telling us what we want to hear, and showing us what we want to see. Competetive markets are like that, and that is why it is better for us to be blind and attentive, rather than clairvoyant and distracted. There is no way to sell news to somebody who is all-knowing, or at least, more in the know than the media.

What a station is broadcasting has nothing to do with it's political alignment. In the states, rivals CNN and Fox News compete head to head, and they like to slander each other with political labels. Instead what they are doing, is insulting their viewership. CNN is not liberal, they are merely selling to their audience, which may be liberal. Fox is not conservative, they just really like pandering to conservative crowds.

And yet, we blame the media for our blindness. We grow angry when our forged sword of truth no longer cuts the soul. The media is responsible for what it publishes, this is true. We could publish stories until there is no words left to speak, but if it is not something that people like to read, then we have failed, and no matter how true our paper, it will sink out of business.

The philosophy of blindness permeates all things, from religion, to politics, to war... they are all the same. The Central Powers in WWI believed that they were winning the war right up until the bitter end, and then believed that they had been backstabbed by a faceless ally (later scapegoated into the Jews by Hitler). Christianity, with all its sects, each one believing itself to be truer than its neighbor, closing themselves away from their neighbors. This is people only seeing their own righteousness, rather than opening their minds, and hearts, an accepting based on similarity, rather than dividing because of benign differences.

Hate, is perhaps the greatest blinder. People who hate blind themselves willfully, and lose their ability to see others as humans. I know many who wallow with joy in hatred for another, whether it be a person, a group, a religion, whatever. It's all the same poison. To harm another because you hate them is merely wounding yourself on a forward roll. Every injury you willfully make will hunt you until it is done tenfold to you or your ilk. Suffering is indiscriminant, and will get us all someday. It is better though, when we can see if coming.