I am Sharon Riegie Maynard from the Seattle area of Washington. I was invited to present a paper at IFLAC Congress of Pave Peace because of my place in the media field.
In February 2005, I formed sisterspace.net, a new form of broadcasting. It is a global Internet community of women’s voices with ideas that encourage us, stories that cause us to cry, words that inspire us to absolutely move mountains and rebalance the world. The joy in witnessing women awaking is why I do what I do. To help women feel connected, share stories and shout!
The topic for this presentation is The Communication Revolution and Its Effect on Culture.
I was given another version with I was first invited to present, and I would like to go back to that topic, The Effect of Broadcasting on Culture. Broadcasting has a much larger meaning and is something that we all do.
So, first, let me use the dictionaries to define the word, Broadcast:
To cast and scatter in all directions, to make public, to make widely known, to transmit, for example, with sound and images, and to communicate.
Although I am in the broadcasting media, I grew up in the United States of America. What do I know about a culture of war or conflict?
I was raised in a loving home in a conservative religious community where men made decisions for their family and community out of love. Where men went to war out of love. Following the decisions of men made life easier for the women for they were not accountable for making a mistake. All that they had to do is obey. Men chose a life and women helped to make the man’s life run smoothly.
It wasn’t until many years later that I recognized that this loving structure had outlived its usefulness for me. This community model came from a time when small villages were in danger from unknown sources and a tight cohesive unit was created from a central leader. I recognized that the actions from this old paradigm, although motivated by fear for loved ones, developed patterns of dysfunctionality. It fostered thinking that made it difficult for women to act in healthy ways in the world as it was becoming.
As I looked back on my life, my father and the men in the community, were very strong images but my mother was hardly in my memory. Not that she had not been present. Not that she had not been loved. Not that she had not been loving. But in that community model she was made invisible. Women were not acknowledged as voices of leadership although they silently kept the community together.
So I came to my own identity as a woman while I worked with other women. For the past 18 years I worked as a mystic shawoman to witness and midwife individuals, especially women, past the message of their pain, their powerlessness and into their divine authenticity.
As I worked with the women I became more and more convinced of the validity of the old Chinese saying, “When sleeping women wake, mountains will move.” In our time, Gloria Steinam has said it this way, “One day, a group of gray haired women will slowly take over the world.” And here we are today, gray haired women walking with blonds, brunettes, red-heads and black curls. Awakened women lead by gray haired crones.
Once a woman has evolved/moved beyond her pain she becomes anger. Then she evolves beyond her anger and finds her clarity and her own voice. Then she does what all women do, she bakes a cake, sews a quilt, cooks a dinner. She finds ways to feed the hunger, clothe the naked and create community. Then she wants to know about your cake, your quilt and your dinner. And we form circles so we can see each other’s faces as we share, we laugh, we cry, dance and shout,
“You go, girl!”
Now what about broadcasting?
My experiences in the healing field have shown me that everything is energy. Energy is affected by outside influences and especially by intentional broadcasting. TV, radio, and micro currents are intentional broadcasting forms that you will recognize. But there are also thoughts, emotions, prayers, meditations, and blessings. Singing, dancing, hugging and shouting are also broadcasting and they all affect our environmental energy. All of these broadcasting forms are powerful in creating a culture of peace or of conflict.
Let’s consider, for a moment, the radio and T.V. systems that we normally think of as broadcasting. Many have worried that there are five companies who own the mass media within the U.S. These five companies are exerting more and more control to dictate news; focus and content.
I am not worried.
Why?
Because broadcasting impacts energy. It casts and scatters in all directions. It will make public, make widely known, and transmit in order to communicate. Everyone broadcasts and what determines the broadcasting information is the quality of character of the one doing the broadcasting.
The quality of character of individuals and their values are the foundation from which a culture grows. That also gives me hope. Let me tell you why.
There was a survey first taken within the U.S. of America in the 1960’s. It was unusual in that it’s purpose was to identify personal values within this country, to measure and document those values. When the survey was compiled, there were clearly three groups who held very unique views. These groups were given the names, Homelanders, Modernists and Cultural Creatives. The first two groups were the largest; indeed there were only 3% in the Cultural Creative category. Three percent was the margin of error for this survey and so the question asked was “Did this group exist or were the numbers a mistake bleep?” No one knew for sure.
But the values of each were clear.
The Homelanders were identified by their fundamentalist views. George Lakoff clearly describes them in his book, don’t think of an elephant!. The Homelanders believe that the world is not safe, that there are bad guys who must be eliminated. They believe that children are basically lazy and left to their own devices will become non-productive and possibly criminal. This requires a strong father figure who dictates to the family in order to keep them safe. The children must be held to a narrow path and are punished if they show independence. Sounds like the community in which I was raised, the old paradigm of the tribal village. It is very patriarchal in which the male dominates.
The Modernists hold values represented the old boy corporate model. They consider central authority as the best form for making decisions, the one in charge knows best. Bigger is better; more toys, more power and peak experiences give a person value but this becomes a culture in which what you have is never enough Competition, I win and you lose, is normal and there is a need for those who live and work in poverty in order to create a system of extreme profits for a few.
The Homelanders and the Modernists were the dominate views from which the culture within the United States had been built.
The Cultural Creatives looked at life quite differently. They leaned more toward inclusive values. They held the view that everything is divine and therefore a group can accomplish more than one alone. They placed value on mutual trust, building relationships and interpersonal skills such as cooperation, negotiation and diversity. They knew that paradoxical, outside the box thinking, will create chaos which is okay because it allows for new paradigms. Endurance and sustainability were valued. And one of the deepest held beliefs was that they were alone in their views. Remember that idea and I will address it in a moment.
Hope appears in the later surveys. The fasted and indeed the only growing group has been the Cultural Creatives. It is estimated that there are well over 65 million in the U.S. and from surveys taken abroad, a similar growth is happening in other parts of the world.
But still, in 2003, with 65 million others, the Cultural Creative still felt alone. Why? Here is were the value of broadcasting in creating culture is shown. During that time the mass media, broadcasters from our five corporations, have reflected the Modernist views. The current political party in power within the United States has reflected and broadcast the Homelanders value system.
The Cultural Creatives do not identify with the Homelanders or Modernist values and yet most of what they have heard broadcast are those views. And so what will happen? When difference appear, a Homelanders, will call you an enemy and find a bigger sword. A Modernist will look for your weakness, create a need and develop a new gadget to sell you. But a Cultural Creative would come together, re-frame and create something new that is in alignment to her values. This will happen in all areas of life and that is what is being done in Broadcasting. I believe that the communication revolution is coming from within human beings, such as the Cultural Creatives, that are demanding new structures built from their values. That is why I feel great hope.
Take, for example, the Internet. The Internet has the world covered and it is expanding daily. You know about e-mail and web sites, but the technology that puts pictures and video quickly onto the web even from cell phones, makes it possible for stories to be told from people in the middle of the experience, from the grass roots. There are journals for sharing experiences, weblogs where ideas are shared, questioned, expanded, deepened and corrected. WIKI models that allow for those who had been the audience to become the creators by submitting articles that form the information pages. A new form of media was created for the Seattle World Trade Organization protest, the Independent Media Center. This was formed so that the entire world would know what was happening not just from mass media journalists, but also from those who were on the ground, in the experience.
Since the creation of these forms of information sharing, the Internet is recognized as the first modern media owned by the audience giving the audience a voice.
Big Media may continue to control, but now citizen journalists are everywhere to write and to share. We are hearing new voices sharing what they think, what they see, and what they know. With a large population of educated, aware and caring people being the media, there is hope.
Yesterday, Dr. Cynthia King shared this quote, “When spider webs unite, they can stop a lion.” Internet linkages are the spider webs of technology. One of the broadcasting forms being revolutionized.
Our world is a global village and we, the people, are all responsible for its formation, direction, health and safely. In Article 29 of the United Nations Charter for Human Rights is says, We all have duties to the community and thereby we experience the full development of our personality.
The title, Doctors without Borders, really describes a reality in our world. That which happens in one culture, one country moves beyond that countries space because there are no borders that will hold the energy. No boundary can keep energy within the space of a culture from moving into the space of another. When a child is killed in Iraq, a mother cries in the United States and may not know why.
Paul Tillich, a German theologian, said, “The first duty of love is to listen.”
Our global village must be built on love and must begin with me. So, I am here to listen, and to listen and to listen. And to encourage each of you to be a part of this broadcasting revolution. We can create media webs, healing webs, dancing webs, singing webs. These webs of unity will not need to stop lions because they can allow lions to know their fellow lions as their honored, loved and respected selves.
An authentic woman is a holder of space, a womb for new life and birth. That is why I work with women. It is time for us to wake up, to find the voice of our wombs, to hold hands, claim the earth as our collective womb. To broadcast, communicate with dance, song, art, write, speak and create a culture for our planet. A culture that reflects the truth of our global family of love, of joy and of peace.
Then we can shout together,
You go, my friends!
A New Covenent with America
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
What we have in the United States of America is a spiritual crisis, a crisis of the soul, of the sacred. And it is this crisis that is at the core of the power to sway politics called the Religious Right.
To navigate out of the quagmire of this movement, you must understand the spirit crisis. Over many years, we, as a nation, have moved away from meaningful work, companies that valued the human worth and dignity of their workers into work environments that are more and more about production and profit for the few: the owner, stockholders, C.E.O. It has created a system in which an individual spends the greatest number of hours viewed for what they can do for the company, more hours, more ideas, and less and less value on his/her human dignity. The value is on the “bottom line”.
People leave their job exhausted, drained and with a mind set that carries over into their personal time – “what can others do for me ‘. It results in a loss of soul, of meaning and comes from the place we spend the majority of our day. This is the reason we have a spirutal crisis and those who are at the head of the ‘religious right” gained great following by being the first to give a name to what millions were feeling.
Others would call it the prison mentality.
In a system of power over, those in power expect and control and reward. They wield ultimate power over. There is no mutual valuing, seeing the worth and dignity of a soul for all that is imalued is the bottom line, control and profit or control to make a profit.
What is a part of the power over system is scapegoating. Instead of the system holding itself accountable, it points the finger of blame at disenfranchised groups. In the case of the political culture, it can be gays/lesbians, women who work, people from the Middle East, people of color, illegal immigrants, and the list goes on. “These people have no morals and are destroying our families”, for example.
And in this system of crisis, non-accountability and blame, the answers from the top are always designed to keep the system in place. Unless the “common folk” step back and recognize the problem is with the system and how the system has created the problem, one group after another is targeted.*
This is our country and just as happened in Germany, there are voices offering a way out.
The question for you is, will you be duped as were the Germans? Or will you learn, listen and show up for a new way?
There are ways to stop the madness because of individuals who have gone into the forest of darkness, felt the fear of our situation and been touched by the sacred light of a greater power, of deep hope, a new vision. They have seen their part to play and are doing it.
Rabbi Michael Lerner was touched by a way to counter the spiritual crisis. His book, The Left Hand of God is a must read.
Read the book and then join the Network of Spiritual Progressives which is the alternative to the Religious Right and A New Direction. For those of us who consider ourselves Progressives, here is a focus, action group that advocating a NEW BOTTOM LINE.
*personal note:
I remember reading a statement from a man who had lived through the holocaust. He said something like this, “First, they came for the gypsy and I was not one and so I stood by. They, they came for the gays and I was not one and so I stood by. They came for the Jews and I was not one and so I stood by. Then, they came for me and there was no one left to stand up for me.”
There is a universal law that says, that which you judge, you get to experience. I don’t think that any other country judged the German people any more than did those of us in this country , the USA. “How did they allow that to happen?”
That which we judged, we are getting to experience.
