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Sometimes it seems as though we're shouting down a well, trying to explain to people who cannot and will not understand what we're trying to say.
I absolutely understand the frustration. We're working against conventional "wisdom" and the seemingly insurmountable hurdle of the Corporate Media and its near-stranglehold on the information that reaches the general public.
I'm occasionally very frustrated speaking with my best friend, who STILL gets most of his news from mainstream sources. On Thanksgiving we were talking about the voting and he struck me as FAR too influenced by the Corporate Media. He referenced some of the things they were saying in ads put out by the RNC about the campaign between Burner and Reichert here in Washington State (a campaign that actually fell within his particular district) and how it influenced his thinking.
He's on the web, but he didn't really know SHIT about the issues, or how either of them felt about the issues. I think he voted against Burner because of those attack ads that accused HER of attack ads, citing articles in local newspapers.
Reichert's a dick. Thanks to DU I found parts of debates between the two and Darcy Burner blew him out of the water. But since the fucking Corporate Media doesn't bother to actually cover stuff like that, he was totally ignorant of where either of them stood.
Now, admittedly, he leans a bit farther toward the right than I do, though I think this is influenced by his sources of information. And it's irritating as hell.
My father, on the other hand, gets most of his news from the newspapers. And DU, through me. He reads the newspaper from cover to cover, at least any of the headlines that attract his interest. Things about Haliburton and those that click with things that I've already told him about definitely catch his eye.
But it's the things that never, ever, ever, ever, seem to make it into the paper that blow his mind. Or, rather, I should say, the things that seem to take forever to get there...months later he sees verification of something I told him. We seem to be literally months ahead of the curve with the corporate media.
So, yeah, the CM is one of my targets. I despise them for what they've done to us, abandoning the notion of an informed electorate for the benefit of the oligarchs. And I will not, ever, quit shrieking about it at the top of my lungs--or from the tips of my fingers, anyway.
But every time WE put a meme out there, it settles into someone's mind...all but the most infuriately barricaded mind. We are reaching people. We can't give up. Every person who blows us off only to find out we were right later on learns something about us, and about themselves.
We DO know more than they do.
This last election was a verification of this, but we must be sure not to give up, not to allow one small success to cause us to relax. We can only get through to the people who can be reached by continuing to slowly and carefully show them to the truth. We can't force it upon them, but we can lead them to it.
And, I, for one, intend to continue doing precisely that.
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