Unless you’ve been stuck in a different dimension over the past couple of years, you realize there is an enormous debate about the issue of freedom and the direction of our nation. A lot of people have been talking about it. In fact, many are saying we are losing our freedom. It seemed to start with the election of President Obama and the debate over healthcare. Who decides our future? Big government or do we? So the current debate has been framed in terms of choices and our freedom.
Maybe the best way I can illustrate my argument is a speech from Edward R. Murrow, one of the nation’s first pioneers in television journalism. In fact, he wrote the book. The speech was given in 1958 in Chicago before television and radio executives. Historians have called it the wires and lights speech. His words are chilling and prophetic and they should cause all of us to seriously think about the state of our own existence.
“This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse, a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts, but the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies, and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black in white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and compliant. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant and disturbing information. Our mass media reflects this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”
You have to remember that Murrow said this over 50 years ago. I’m sure he would be absolutely amazed if he could see the extent of today’s mass media and the rise of our media culture. The question is, are we being distracted from the truth. Are we insulated from the realities of the world we live in? Has it been done by design? Let’s put it this way. Is the media culture a form of a drug? I’m convinced we’re being medicated into compliance. For the most part, we really don’t understand what’s happening around us. We are told what to think in a nice way that suggests that we are making our own decisions. But are we?
I’m not sure who’s in control. Does it matter if it’s big government or big business? The point is your freedoms are long gone. You just don’t realize it. The media culture has made sure of that. There is only one way to exercise your freedom. And it’s not through the ballot box. Nor is it through revolution or political change. The only place you can be free is in your spirit. And you do that by accepting Christ. There is no freedom on earth. There never has been. Your freedom lies elsewhere, outside of this system. In fact, this world and this world system has never been our destination. That’s radical thinking. Are you ready to be free?
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