"If I Could Change the World "

READING

“The Moreness of Everything,” from “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It,” by Thomas de Zengotita

For small groups of privileged people there have always been style choices, entertainment choices, experience choices, of course. But slower to change – and fewer, far fewer. In kind and number. And this matters, because here we collide with a real limit, one of the only ones that remain, a limit to which even today’s modes of cultural production must submit – namely, how much the screen of human consciousness can register at a given moment. No innovation in techno-access or sensationalism can overcome this bottleneck. It determines the fundamental dynamic of our public culture: the battle for your attention. . . .

Under these conditions, the mind is forced to certain adaptations, if it is to cohere at all. So, for example, when you hear statistics about AIDS in Africa for the 349th time, or see your 927th picture of a weeping fireman or an oil-drenched seabird, you can’t help but become fundamentally indifferent – unless it happens to be ‘your issue,’ of course, one you ‘identify with,’ a social responsibility option you have chosen. Otherwise, you glide on, you have to, because you are exposed to things like this all the time. All the time. Over breakfast. In the waiting room. Driving to work. At the checkout counter. All the time.

I know you know this already. I’m just reminding you.

Which is not to say you are never moved. On the contrary, you are moved, often deeply, very frequently. You are entirely accustomed, actually, to being moved – by footage, by stories, by representations of all kinds. That’s the point. Often you glide by, but sometimes you weep. You weep at movies, you weep at live coverage of 9/11 ceremonies, you weep when you hear ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ or when you hear Martin Luther King invoking his dream in a PBS documentary. . . .

It’s not your fault that you are so used to being so moved; you just are. You spend a great deal of money and time accessing what moves you. You are a connoisseur of what moves you. So it’s not surprising that you learn to move on to the next, sometimes moving, moment. As a mediated person, you know that your relations with the moving will pass, and the stuffed screen accommodates your adaptation to it by providing moving surfaces that assume you are mobile enough to accommodate them. And so on, back and forth, back and forth, everywhere at once, all day, all night, innumerable vibrations, back and forth, myriad capillaries of individuated mediational transactions engulfing the planet.

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Thomas de Zengotita. “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It.” New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005, pp. 23-24.

SERMON

Something about having a finite number of sermons left to deliver is causing me to attempt increasingly ambitious, even grandiose subjects as the end approaches. A rising sense of panic about not being able to say it all interferes with my ability to have anything at all to say. Today it’s “If I could change the world.” I suppose my last sermon will have to be “The meaning of life.”

I’ve always preferred to look at the small picture, how one person or one relationship or one step towards justice can bring about positive change. But now I’m drawn to the long retrospective view. After fifteen years of living and working in one community, I’ve seen a lot; some days I think I’ve seen it all.

When I moved to California, I collected impressions of my new surroundings. What I noticed first: the stark contrast between rich and poor. New, expensive cars and people pushing shopping carts. Beautiful homes overlooking the ocean and people sleeping on the beach.

After a while, these conflicting realities settle in. Our observations lose their edge; except for the children, who see the suffering for exactly what it is and are upset by it. Parents bring their children to church so that they can learn how to turn their anxiety into action, their fear into the good habits of service and caring. We collect food for the hungry. We take part in Big Sunday. We’re willing to be a drop in the bucket – give a few more dollars to save Darfur – because only these gestures stand between us and the state of numbness and apathy we come here to resist. Our defenses may be hardened, our minds flooded with too much information that moves us and then paralyzes us, but we keep alive the hope that we can still make a difference. Making a difference involves making choices, however. We find ourselves pulled in more than one direction, adjudicating among competing issues.

Some can choose. They have good reasons. Climate change: without the earth we’ll have nothing at all. Acquiring the skills of sustainable living is both comforting and constructive. Take a stand against the war: hundreds of thousands of deaths is a compelling argument. Saving even one life would be a good reason to get up in the morning. Or caring about all the ways in which human beings are stripped of their dignity, forced into painful and subservient situations, their rights out of reach, waiting for justice forever.

Choose something and stick with it is probably the best advice we can give each other. We can’t do everything, but we can do something. What is worst of all is to do nothing.

If I could change the world, I would do it one person at a time. Set off a great blossoming of compassion and kindness in each of us. An awakening so powerful that we would put aside the urge to beat each other over the head with money, weapons, or religion, and understand that all we have is each other.

But right at the moment, all I know is what I can do. Start with myself; move out into the world. There is no formula that covers all problems; no universal remedy for every ill. Some seek ideologies; and some ideologies are certainly better than others. But I choose to begin with the conviction that no one person is better than another. Just living by that guideline is enough to shake things up a bit.

As most of you know, I walk my dog several times a day, usually around my Sunset Park neighborhood. Being on the street so much, I know everyone. Not just other dog walkers or people I from church or yoga or Bob’s Market. I know the homeless people and the scavengers who work our alleys; I know the prostitute and the drug runner, the serial inebriates and the schizophrenics. Walking democratizes a neighborhood. I say hello to people if I meet them in my alley. I begin to know who they are, whoever they are.

Life in Santa Monica offers diversity, a kind of diversity that is both appealing and unsettling. I feel safer knowing my neighbors, even the ones who are up to no good. But the better I know them, the more acutely I feel the great chasm between us. How is it that we live in a place where some people can be so incredibly rich and others have nothing at all? How is that having nothing becomes something we accept, as part of our common life, and not as the injustice it really is?

Homelessness is a condition that is caused by adversity, from domestic violence to post traumatic stress; by mental illness desperately self-medicated with drugs and alcohol; by fear and low self-esteem and sometimes, by just not having enough money. to pay the rent. It’s not a choice, except in the sense that someone might lose the capacity to do anything else. Unfortunately, we can all too easily end up being outraged by something a homeless person does rather than by the misery a homeless person feels.

In the great scheme of things, is homelessness the worst social injustice? I don’t know. But it happens outside my door. It seems to me that is one part of my world I might actually change.

The story of Cesar Chavez is an example of how one person took on the suffering he saw in his world and turned it into a movement for justice. In his day, migrant workers had neither homes nor fair wages, their working conditions were punishing, and even children were pressed into service. Chavez showed his co-workers that they deserved better. A talented organizer and charismatic leader, Chavez did far more than one normal person could handle. But he started with himself and next to nothing; found some allies; and did what no one else had done before: showed people they had power if they joined together. And then they changed their world.

This week, with the May 1 workers’ rally just past and Cinco de Mayo upon us, we see how the spirit of Cesar Chavez is still very alive. The problems of our time are more intractable and complex, perhaps, and it is easy to be confused about what any one person can do. In Mediated, the book from which I took our reading this morning, we heard how we bounce from one compelling image to another, unable to keep up with the barrage of information.[i] The world we wish we could change is bigger than our immediate circle of neighbors or co-workers. Everything is too much and we want to withdraw, sampling only what we can handle.

The author of “Mediated” describes the difference this way. “The contrast is stark with, say, the Middle Ages. By the industrial era, a lot more was happening, obviously, and the possibility of overload became an issue then. Think of Baudelaire, adrift in the city crowd, celebrating the artist for maintaining vulnerability in that chaos of stimulation, setting the standard for the genius of modernism. But a qualitative threshold has been breached since then. Cities no longer belong to the soulful flaneur, but to the wired-up voyeur in his soundproof Lexus. Behind his tinted windows, with his cell phone and CDs, he gets more input, with less static, from more channels, than Baudelaire ever dreamed of.”[ii]

It helps to know what we’re up against. Not so that we have a reason to give up, but so that we can adjust our psyches and our strategies to do what we can in this brave new world. As for me, I am starting with one person at a time, because that is where everything begins. My goal right now is to convince my dog-walking neighbor that she should take one of the Section 8 seats on the Santa Monica Housing Commission. She’s smart, principled, outspoken, and knows what it’s like to have her home inspected every year by the City. She’s been laid off, gotten depressed, and slept on friends’ couches. She doesn’t have a car to drive. But she has a voice and all she needs is someone to tell her she has something to say.

And what if the City heard her – really took in her experience, grasped how she struggled and worked to make a home, understood how hard it was through no fault of her own? Could we all just give so some people could have just a little more than nothing? Could we change our world just enough to make that happen?

I know; we don’t seem to be headed there anytime soon. But a freshman class at Santa Monica High School is not daunted. They are going to save Darfur. Nobody else has so far. Why not them – and us?

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[i] Thomas de Zengotita. “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It.” New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005, pp. 23-24.

[ii] Ibid., p. 25.