PopcornJackTerry

I spend a lot of time on Facebook, sometimes so much so that I would classify it as “too much”. I could try to explain it away as simply trying to stay in touch with the cultural zeitgeist (man, I love that word. So happy I got to use it. It’s part of my holy trinity of words, along with panacea and diaspora. Can’t wait until I can use those words. Just as soon as I figure out what they mean. And don’t even ask me to pronounce panacea.) but something about making that my excuse for why I’m on it all the time sounds just a little too much like “I can quit whenever I want” for me to be comfortable saying it. Truth is I can be lazy and I am the world’s greatest procrastinator.

The other day I was randomly scrolling through the news feed on Facebook (I find it hysterical that they call it a “news” feed. Like anything that shows up there could be considered news. Well, I guess maybe in this day and age, but not anything that the world really needs to know.) when I came across a friend’s post about the whole Big Bird-Presidential debate brou-ha-ha. Like most political posts I just kept scrolling down, not too concerned to read what he had written, but I saw a comment that one of his friends had written that seemed pretty interesting, so I stopped and read all the comments.

Now, before I go any farther, let me very clear that this is not a political blog in any way, shape or form. The reason I’m writing this blog has nothing to do with either candidate or political party and who and what I think you should vote for. (Two things I don’t discuss-politics and religion. It’s the bartender in me. I don’t even discuss religion much with my family, which may not seem too odd to you until you learn that both my mother and brother are Methodist ministers. In fact, the last time we did talk religion, it was when I told them I followed in their footsteps myself by becoming a minister-with the Universal Life Church. The same people who used to advertise in the back of Rolling Stone.) If you know even the least bit about the first debate and how Big Bird fits in to that, that’s all the knowledge you need.

The person commenting on the original post brought up an interesting point that I had never considered about funding for PBS. (That makes it sound like I consider their funding often. I don’t.) Remember a few years ago when “Tickle Me Elmo” was the hottest selling toy for Christmas? Who gets all those profits? Think about all the licensing agreements that Sesame Street has out there, with the stuffed animals, the ice shows and the like. They got to be making money, right? Where does that money go? If this were to be a political post I would do the research and point out how much money said licensing agreements take in, where that money goes to, how large the budget for PBS is, how much of the funding comes from the government and not viewers like you, that sort of thing. I’m sure that information is out there somewhere, but it’s not important now.

The original concept of PBS was to have a network free from commercial sponsorship in order to create a seemingly unbiased programming lineup. In other words, you could trust the integrity of what you were watching, specifically the children’s educational programming, and know that it wasn’t a thinly disguised shill for some commercial enterprise. But what if, in ding so, they became their own commercial entity, and had the ability to create a profit? Shouldn’t that profit be used to finance the network, eventually becoming self-sustaining? (This of course doesn’t even begin to address the whole paradox of a non-profit entity earning a profit.) That was the gist of this guy’s opinion, one he shared several times in response to the original post.

Here’s the problem, though. I couldn’t seriously consider the guy’s argument because he was easily the most profane, angry and antagonistic person I’d come across in a long time on the internet, and that’s saying something. I wasn’t concerned with his line of thinking. I was concerned with the safety of his neighbors. I said a prayer to whatever God people that angry believe in, asking him to make sure this guy did not have access to high power weapons and a clock tower. I understand the partisan anger that is out there; this guy brought it to a whole new terrifying level. At one point he calls Big Bird a stupid m-f-er and tells him to pay his own bills. Frightening. (More frightening is that, based on his screen name, he’s quite the pot smoker. My memory of pot is that it mellows you out. I think someone replaced his weed with meth.)

What you say isn’t important if how you say it makes it so no one wants to hear it. Your message might be the most important one in the world but without an audience it is just words lost in the wind. And it isn’t just words. So much of what we say is perceived in how we carry our bodies. (They don’t call it body language for nothing.) You could be telling someone how happy you are to see them, but if your arms are held tight across your chest while you say it, they aren’t going to believe you. And the challenge to all of this is that we have, each of us, developed such a set way of carrying ourselves that we don’t even realize we are doing it anymore. We can’t see what it is and so, we keep carrying ourselves forward in a way that still holds us back.

The next time you find yourself in a situation where you don’t think your point is coming across, stop for a second and take a quick inventory of what’s going on. Are you physically closed off? Is there a tone or an edge in your voice? Are you not giving the other person your undivided attention and instead distracted by something else (like Facebook?) Once you get there, refocus yourself on your task at hand and make sure that it is what you’re saying and not how you’re saying it that the other person is taking in.

(Panacea: a remedy to all disease or ill; an answer or solution to all problems or difficulties. Diaspora: the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland. Coming soon to a blog near you…)