Heavy Randomness That's Not So Random

I'm feeling very random. I suffer from inner monologues on a daily basis and I partially blame these rants confined in my noggin for my nutty behavior and helpless randomness. These dialogs with myself start sometime during my morning grooming and stop only when I crawl under my mosquito net and into bed at night. The only way I can seem to get a break is if I absorb myself in a book (currently "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami) or grunt affirmations earnestly along with NPR podcasts (currently "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" "The African American Roundtable" and "NPR's Story of the Day.")

This morning, I was thinking about how it's imperative for us (white, upper/middle-class Americans) to invest a great deal of time, thought and commitment to creating solutions for the problems of the minority (in terms of power, not population) groups in America in order to create a solid and just place for every member of our country. It seems so obvious, right?

Sentences flash on the black slate of my brain:

When did natural disasters become entrenched in racial issues, or have they always been?

I guess I imagine (romantically and probably naively) hurricanes and their destruction at times before the Industrial Revolution to have been a time of group strife, as well as re-birth. If every one's house was torn down, then everyone probably pitched in to put all of them back up again, right? (I'm trying to convince myself as I type that they were all of equal stature and in equally useful areas.)

If the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers flooded in ancient Mesopotamia, sometime around the year 5000BC and wiped out the freshly settled hunters and gatherers, the survivors would all have work together to plant another crop of corn and survive, right? But, even then, were there disenfranchised groups? Were there people who's plight seemed less important to those with power and prestige?

When did American media become a pulpit for white, upper/middle-class people, ignoring the plight of the vast majority of men and women who live within it's national borders, and hear it's radio broadcasts, read it's newspapers and watch it's "reporting" on TV? (Or, has it always been this way?)

Uh oh. I'm seeing a re-occurring theme. I have to keep asking if it's always been this way. That might tell me a thing or two. Maybe it has and I'm getting shook up to that fact.

I know this may seem elementary to you, but it came as a bit of a shock to me when I realized (again) how separate the issues are concerning different groups in America, and how those are represented (or not) in main-stream American media. It gets a bit overwhelming, however, when we think about the reasons for these "oversights" in reporting. We have to take into account who's pockets these papers and networks are in and what their priorities are. Then, we also have to take into account that individual reporters as well as their medium are looking for national or international renowned and money, money, money.

Now, I'm not saying that all media is propagating on behalf of someone or some contribution. There are countless forms of information in the world which report true and accurate accounts of some shocking and astonishing things. It's just that much of the time, these niches of the media are seen as renegade and on the fringe. Or, if they are seen as credible, only a small portion of people (in proportion to the population of the US) see or hear them. I'd really like to see a day when the overall population of the United States is presented, by the cable networks, a more proportionate coverage of stories that matter to us all.

So, when one individual's ideal is to shift the entire reporting community to look at issues facing the majority of people in the country without sensationalism that sells papers, what can one individual do? One can write her frustrations on a blog that two people read intermittently and go about her life teaching English. That, or become a correspondent for CNN or something.

Sidenote: Please go to www.thislife.org and listen to the net-cast of This American Life entitled Habeas Schmabeaus.