You’re on TV

The best shots I’ve seen so far were those in the blocked intersections of Bangkok where old ladies apply make-up and gentlemen break into dance, two-stepping their protest into 15 minutes of fame. That was before a guy with lowered head cap and running shoes tossed a grenade on the other side of a partition to the yellow shirts, as perhaps, his statement that “enough is enough.” With strutting politician Suthep Thaugsuban, erstwhile deputy prime minister in the last government, passionately urging the blocking of election precincts to prevent advance voters in Bangkok to vote, someone finally took sight of a leader of the anti-government protesters and pulled the trigger.

The evenings are no longer lit with friendly body-warming bonfires as buildings in Kiev and Cairo, Phnom Penh and Bangkok enflame the skies in the night. Marchers in Sao Paolo question the use of government funds for FIFA’s World Cup when social services sorely needed in Brazil are not getting the attention they deserve.

Maryland, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania made the news three days in a row last week for guns going off with clear intent to kill. Of course, this is now treated as a matter of course in a country that has had 20 attempts to kill presidents. Four had been successful. Since JFK, save Lyndon Johnson, every president was threatened with assassination.

The United Nations reported in 2009 that 67 percent of U.S. homicides were by firearms. With the second amendment (the right to bear arms) in the Bill of Rights hotly debated, many using either self-defense and/or the pleasure of hunting as justification, 25 percent of the U.S. population own guns. Since Obama’s watch, there has been 91 recorded school shootings, Sandy Hook in Connecticut being the most notorious, and before Barack, Columbine in Colorado.

Matthew Ward in 1853 in Louisville, KY bought a pistol one morning and killed the schoolmaster for excessive punishment of his brother the day before. Ward was acquitted of the crime but the practice of expressing one’s displeasure through the barrel of a gun has not abated.

The tableau, however, has changed. Not only don’t we have the specter of TV horde pointing cameras at every reported misdemeanor, we also now have smartphone services that carry news (all 4G of it) 7/24 instead of waiting for the evening news with a glass of ice-cold lemon tea in our favorite reclining sofa.

I remember stopping over Cebu City in the Visayas in early ’64 on my way to Davao City in Mindanao for a national forensic competition. I was interviewed on local TV in what I thought was a surprisingly tiny makeshift room, needing tidying badly. I part-timed as a teenager on radio in DZCV Tuguegarao so I learned how to conduct myself over the airwaves, but I was not yet familiar with the phenomenon of 15-minutes of fame. The live broadcast seen by colleagues who had the chance to watch it thought that the interview looked very professional. Camera-scope had a way of choosing only the clip it wanted to show. Today, we have paid professionals skilled in the manipulation of radio-TV-smartphone media. Alas, today’s street protesters have also recognized the value of the art.

Being an imaginal educator, I understand the value of images in affecting human behavior. Sound bites and the video clip are now in the arsenal of revolutionaries. One wish the art and the discipline are the only ones employed. Unfortunately, burning tires and shadows in the night inflict more fear and imagined pain than clear objective images. Their employ in protest movements has become ubiquitous.

Now, back to Bangkok and the other cities around the world where massive demonstrations are occurring uncontrollably. We say to the folks on the streets of Cairo, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, and Kiev, to name a few, that those in despair live yesterday, those anxious live in tomorrow’s sorrow, and those who live today are in peace, our paraphrase of Lao Tzu.

There is much of living in yesterday that zeroes on missed opportunities and the tyranny of the “ought.” “We should have…” often lace the discourse, and blame-seeking, blame-throwing is the first order of business of righting wrongs. Anxiety rules tomorrow by the very nature of its mystery. Even statistical probabilities as basis of predictions do not allay foreboding; economic value measures “what is not” rather than “what is” as comparative advantage to determine value.

I am not promoting indecisive que sera sera nor indifferent bahala na here. But even the amein of the Levant, translated as “let it be,” sounds more like abject surrender in the Arabic anshallah, and the popular Buddhist chant of om mani padme hum asserting peace is still fundamentally a declaration of “nothingness as everything.”

So, you want to be on TV. I am not prescriptive but it makes sense to be proactive. What is it that one objectively intends to promote? The 15 minutes of psychological therapy for feeling that one has righted a wrong is time wasted; the 15 minutes to assert one’s anxiety over the uncertainty of things to come is a dart wasted in the dark. 

Celebrate. Today. All of it in your whole waking hours. You’re on TV!