With all that has happened in the last month and the events that continue to escalate hour by hour, I began to listen closer to things that perhaps never captured my attention before.
I have started to focus on the diatribes that go on with characters who have the power to influence large numbers of fairly ignorant and uninformed people. I have begun to question the fundamental “freedom of speech” when it comes to freedom of speech attached to the ability to blast one’s message out to millions of listeners.
With that introduction, let me ask, have you ever gotten just a little bit angry with the people who use the term ‘my personal opinion’ when they write highly read columns (current writer excluded), or stand or sit in front of cameras on national TV, or blast over the airwaves to hundreds of thousands of sub-intellectuals?
They present their harangues as only one small statement made by just one, meek, quiet, noninfluential individual. This brand of “well, it’s just me speaking my itsy-bitsy little ol‘ comments everybody has the right to do” is where I get angry.
These parasites on humanity are allowed to voice their opinions to a vast segment of the population. Yes, they speak their own opinion, but that opinion is blasted out to a world filled with some very gullible, and I am sorry to say, vastly unintelligent people - people who cannot create one coherent thought unless it is pumped into their heads by an outside source. They thrive on believing they have independent thought, while in actuality they simply repeat the opinion of characters who thrive on spreading uninformed, malicious and highly dangerous garbage.
At this point, please don’t start that famous retort of the on-air personalities, “If you don’t like it, just turn it off.” I usually do, but I am becoming more fearful of those cretins who thrive on getting all their intelligent thought from such megalomaniacs.
All one has to do is listen to on-air characters on the morning shows to get a daily dose of “well, its only my opinion,” and then listen to the varieties of sub-intelligent individuals who run to their cell phones (the new way to brandish pseudo-status in America) and regurgitate whatever the loud-mouthed commentator has spread over the airwaves. A recent blast of “my opinion” from a morning personality had him criticizing the students at MacDonald Middle School for creating buttons that advocated peace in the world and an end to bloodshed. He was clear in saying that he wasn’t criticizing these wonderful little children because that’s what they are -- children. He was just saying their ideas were screwed up because the buttons should have had a mushroom cloud on top of Osama bin Laden.
But that was only his opinion. His opinion then became the opinion of the mass of his faithful followers, the brain dead of America. His opinion reinforced the more hardened unintelligent to go ahead with any form of hostility against people who don’t think or look like us.
A comment this individual made a day before reared its ugly head as I listened to his “let’s drop the atom bomb” idea. He was talking about his son, a sixth-grader, who stood in class to tell a fellow classmate, who had questioned some activity that was going on, that if he didn’t like it the way it is here, he should just get out. Our commentator, you could tell, was gushing with pride at the actions of his clone. This went right along with his idea for his son’s problem with a fellow student, “Ignore him the first time, then deck him the second time.”
The terrorists of the world train their children to hate from birth and so do those diatribists who litter our print media, radios and televisions.
What is the difference in one form of hatred or another? Am I different from any other terrorist if I train my child to hate people different from me, or to despise anyone who has a thought that doesn’t mesh with mine?
It was interesting that this same commentator on the following morning was haranguing one of the other on-air people for mentioning the University of Michigan’s football game before the MSU game. He could have used a variety of tacks to ridicule the individual, but he chose an interesting focus. He started yelling at the man, calling him Ahmed and Mohammed - specifically targeting an ethnicity based on common Arabic names. He went on calling the man an enemy because he placed U-M ahead of MSU.
It didn’t take long to understand this poor fellow was being directly compared to the World Trade Center terrorists and should be treated accordingly. I can only guess that the commentator’s minions filled the call line with “Kill that on-air guy. Who does he think he is.”
I think that is probably the same tactic that bin Laden uses when he harangues his troops. He just uses Billy Bob and Amy Sue as the enemies of his cause. The world will never change if we continue to put on a pedestal the bin Ladens and their equally vicious counterparts in the United States of the world who are always spouting their opinions - opinions that are counter to all we as human beings need to espouse.
This is not a conservative idea, or a moderate idea, or a liberal idea. It has nothing to do with censorship. It is far more important. It is a wake-up call for us to stop allowing these kinds of parasites to direct our thinking. Stand up for intelligence, honor, diversity and pride of all we do. Stop listening to individuals whose only purpose is continue their own constant barrage of ignorance.
It is a call to be intelligent, to look at the wide variety of opinions that are floating in the world and call the kinds of crackpot garbage exactly what they are - garbage.
Craig Gunn is a communications director in the Department of Engineering. He can be reached at gunn@egr.msu.edu.
