Mainstream Media, and Avoiding Burnout as an Activist

"There's something wrong with the the world today, I don't know what it is.
Something's wrong with our eyes.

"We're seeing things in a different way, and God knows it ain't his,
It sure ain't no surprise."

~Aerosmith~
Living on the Edge


Trigger Warning: Description of real animal abuse and abuse against women and children.

I actually started to type the first line of that song as just a regular blog, and then realized it was the beginning of the song, so I decided to include the rest of the first couple verses. The thing is, I keep wondering if this is a new thing, or if it's been going on for a long time and I just wasn't seeing it. There's actually a meme I've seen on Facebook based on a Futurama character that says pretty much the same thing, only funnier.

I watched a video today that made me see how much good there is in the world. It was people who were caught on hidden cameras doing good deeds. They didn't know they were being filmed, and they weren't doing it for the publicity. The video was on a website called Upworthy, which is something I follow on Facebook, and I'm grateful now that I was led to it by someone else's post. A lot of what they post is extremely inspiring, and I don't mean it in the ways of singing hallelujah and saying amen. I mean that it lifts up your heart for no other reason than that the world can be an incredibly wonderful place. If you would like to see the video, and I highly recommend that you do because it will make your day, you can find it here.

The thing is, whether it's a matter of perception or not, there are some things in this world that are very wrong. Being a feminist and animal rights activist means you see some pretty nasty stuff, and it can be devastating. It can destroy your own humanity. It's very easy for some to just stop caring, or to give up on the world. It's very easy to get depressed by what you see.

Activists can burn out very easily. There's good reason for that. They often see the worst possible cases when it comes to the causes they're fighting for. I was involved in ferret owner's groups where one woman's ferret got out of the house and a stranger poured a corrosive substance down his throat. Then the superintendents of the apartment building where he was found, still alive, threw him into a dumpster to continue suffering until he died. To this day that image haunts me to where I can't fall asleep. No charges were laid against anyone, despite the fact that they knew who had done it, and it was illegal in the state in which it occurred.

The ferret shelter near me sees abuse cases all the time, as do most animal shelters. Seeing animals in pain is enough to send me completely around the bend. I've never been able to bring myself to volunteer at a shelter for that reason. I would probably wind up in jail, because I really can see myself killing someone. People stomp on their pets (on purpose, I mean - we all have accidents where they get underfoot), cut off their tails (not the surgical docking), punch them in the head, kick them so hard they break ribs, and throw them into walls. If you're an animal lover, and you're confronted with someone you know has done this to their pet, it's very hard to restrain yourself.

When it comes to feminism, there are five-year-old girls and infants being raped to death. A woman can't walk down the street without fearing for her safety, knowing that many men think she is worth less than they are, so they have the right to do whatever they want to her. Little girls are being killed at birth because they're not considered the right gender, the important gender. Little girls are having their genitals mutilated, supposedly to make them cleaner (and more chaste), when it actually causes infections and death during childbirth. Women in the military are being sexually assaulted in ever-increasing numbers, and it's treated as a joke by their superior officers. Unless you live in a cave, these are very visible issues. They're being broadcast on the news on a constant basis.

The fact is, there is an unending supply of garbage in the world for the media to feed on. Admittedly, I'm one of them. I write articles about it. I don't do it for pleasure. I don't sensationalize it. I don't lie about it. I'm also responsible in how I write my pieces, or at least try to be, so that no one ever reads something I've written and uses it as inspiration to do something harmful, either to themselves or to another living creature. I don't ever want to find out that someone learned something from me that they then used to a bad end. I'm very , very good at finding things out. Research is a skill every writer should be very good at. (Well, any writer that does the kinds of writing I do anyway - if you're writing poetry about the way a sun shines off a lake, your research will consist of seeing it for yourself most likely, rather than pouring over prescription drug manuals or statistical reports.) Knowing things, however, does not mean I have to provide others with harmful knowledge.

I could go on for the rest of my life, every single day, writing two articles per day, and still not run out of new atrocities to write about. I will never understand why anyone in the media needs to make anything up, because there are plenty of really nasty realities out there to keep the news mill fed 24/7. That's just the way it is. They tend to pick and choose their stories, and then the whole group of mainstream media latches onto those specific ones, ignoring the rest. They tear those chosen stories apart like lions on a zebra, looking for every succulent morsel. When they run out of tasty bits, they throw in parts of a gazelle and pretend it's still zebra, but it's a new and shocking part of zebra we've never seen before, except that it isn't because they're fabricating it. It's like the fakery in fossils, where skeletons from multiple creature were put together to fool the public into thinking there was an amazing new creature. Meanwhile, legitimate new creatures are being found all the time, just not by them, so they make up their own. There are many analogies that could be used to describe mainstream media, but suffice it to say they focus on one story, and one story only.

You see, if the media reported on every single thing that they could be reporting on, most people would become numb after a day or so. There are currently 10 wars going on right now that result in over 1,000 deaths per year. One of them has been going on since 1948. To put this in perspective you should know that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not on this list. We've all heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though, haven't we? However, the internal conflict in Burma, which is the war that's been going on since 1948, resulted in over 12,000 civilian deaths in 2012. Have you been reading about the devastation in Burma? Deaths reported from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict range between 239 and 256 in 2012.

If you don't think mainstream media is picking and choosing what to report on, and what to sensationalize, you'd be very, very wrong. They're not telling you everything. They're not even telling you the most drastic and horrific things - things which you would think they'd want to report on just for the sensationalistic factor alone. I mean, seriously, was there anything particularly out of the ordinary with the whole Jodi Arias case? Sure, kinky sex. Wippee. Free porn sites offer that, too. One woman killed one man, and it was wrong, but it was not particularly uncommon. It was worthy of news on a local level at least, but that international airtime could have been used to cover something that people could have done something about. If it's in your neighbourhood you have a right to know about it, but beyond that why did the whole world need a play-by-play?

On the flip-side of this, they're also not doing a whole heck of a lot to report the good things that are going on in the world. Yes, there are a lot of problems, and yes, they desperately need to be brought to people's awareness, but the problem with focusing solely on the bad news is that people give up on the world. They lose all hope that anything can be done. They resign themselves to the current state of affairs. Not only that, but they determine that they can't do anything to rock the boat, just in case it makes things worse. Fear of rocking the boat makes people docile. Fear makes them compliant and agreeable. Fear turns lions into lambs. Very convenient for those who don't want people making trouble.

What we have to realize as citizens of this planet, is that we need to find our own news. We need to know what's going on in the real world, not the world that's portrayed by television. We can't rely on Fox or CNN to give us the truth, and in my country that would include CBC. These are corporate-owned media companies that have their own interests to look out for. They aren't interested in doing what's good for the world. They're interested in making money. Chances are good they're being bribed by political groups to cover the things those groups want covered.

Manipulation of the media is a well-known political tactic, and it is now so blatant that news anchors are providing wholly biased reporting for their favoured political party. They freely admit to it. The First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was created so that the government could not censor free speech, including the media (which at the time was strictly newspaper accounts), and that there would be separation of church and state. Of course, free speech turns around and bites you on the ass when it also means that people can buy that speech - and that people can say what they want, even if it's not the truth.

Every person on this planet is being lied to and manipulated. Nobody every gets the absolute truth about anything. At best we get what someone honestly believes is the truth, from their point of view. If we think our governments are not lying to us, and mainstream media is reporting responsibly, we're being worse than naive - we're being moronic. People, particularly in corporate and government environments, almost always choose to do what is best for them. In corporate environments they feel less guilt about their actions because they're separated from them by the guise of doing the work of a corporate entity. In other words, they're being told what to do so they feel it really isn't their responsibility.

As a feminist and activist I see the end result of this manipulation. I see the rape culture that is perpetuated, and I see the women who are killed for wanting to go to school. It can be devastating to the soul. If I want to be able to look in the mirror, however, I must keep going. In order to keep going I need something to sustain me, and show me that the world isn't made up of nothing but bad things. I have to allow myself to take breaks and do the things that I enjoy, whether that's playing a computer game or watching a movie. I have to focus on positives for a while before I can go back to the negatives.

Don't get me wrong. Being an activist can also be very uplifting. When you have managed to pull together money to be donated to a cause you believe in, or when you write an article that even a single person reads it and says, "Thank you for writing this," it is one of the best feelings in the world. If you fight for a cause that ends up winning, the elation is unbelievable. Being an activist isn't always a losing proposition. Quite often the activists win. Nothing is ever perfect, though, and it takes time and misery to get there usually. So, when I'm on the verge of feeling like there's nothing decent left in the world I find ways to remind myself that there are. I have to, or I'll lose my reasons for doing it in the first place.