by David Martin, PhD., Founder and Chairman of M·CAM Inc.; Batten Fellow, University of Virginia Darden School of Business
In an age of media soundbites and Twitter’s 140, David Martin makes the point that problems and SOLUTIONS require more depth and greater connections than most take time for. Here is an exerpt from his post on Oct. 8, 2010, the eighth anniversary of the United States Congressional authorization for the Iraq War.
“Ironically, corruption, treason, and greed have gotten so confident in your lack of attention that injustice is done in the open. And NOBODY pays attention. When SAIC floated their IPO, they reported vast unaccounted for sums of money associated with the Greek Olympic security contracts – sums that no accountable organization could verify – and nobody cared. When the New York court found Bulf Oil – a company owned by an Iran-Contra co-conspirator – guilty of numerous Iraqi Oil For Food crimes in which SunTrust, Texaco, BP and Chase Manhattan were all monetarily and materially involved, nobody cared. And when the Vice President of the United States used this same felonious network to prop up the “enemy” for our war on terror, few read about it or cared. When the U.S. government participated in the largest financial cover-up of accounting shenanigans in banks and insurers in 2008, they actually published the evidence in the public and nobody read it.
Do we suffer from a lack of information which would raise our consciousness? Would we pay attention more if we had an honorable, non-mainstream media source that would tell us the truth? Would the lives of Afghanis or Pakistanis mean more to us if we had a social media network that would allow us to use a defense-department funded network (called the internet) to unmask the truth and stand up to propaganda? Would we care more about those displaced and killed by mining and extractive industries if we had better social media platforms to display on our conflict-metal-filled-techno-gadgets?
No.
… In our rush to serve up sound-bytes – even those from the well-intended – we dishonor the reality of a multifactorial system in which covariates are THE story. In isolation things don’t exist and in isolation, they will not be substantially engaged or addressed.
On this day in which we mark the millions who have paid the price for our willingness to acquiesce to the sound-bytes that sold tyranny under the self-righteous banner of “freedom”, we are invited to actually do something. Rather than flagellating ourselves yet again for our unconsidered complicity in the march of injustice and the affront to liberty, we can actually take part in manifesting another narrative for humanity.
Today, we will inaugurate the Exemplar Zero Initiative in New York. … Tomorrow, you will hear of the anticipated launch of the Global Innovation Commons 2.0 – the only global platform that makes innovation data available to every person on Earth who can access a computer or can link to someone with access. We will not wait for the next “killer app”. … We have all we need already – save the willingness to courageously engage. Let’s take that mantle and move forward together. And yes, it’s going to require thinking in complete sentences, paragraphs and even whole stories. Because the story of our seduction has been an epic and we need to learn the language of a new story that will never fit on Twitter.”
For the full editorial, go to http://invertedalchemy.blogspot.com/2010/10/your-attention-please.html.