A few weeks ago, upon walking into a liquor store in Northampton, I noticed a large “God Bless America” poster on the window displaying the flag and the statue of liberty. When I brought my bottles to the counter I noticed that the teller was not American. In fact, as I later found out through some conversation, he was the owner of the store, born in India and a practicing Hindu. So I ask him what was up with the “God Bless America” thing. He simply answered, “It’s good for business.” I paid and walked out.
Why is it that all of a sudden this country is so “God” oriented? Where did this come from? Since when did we all get so religious? Am I to believe we have entered the start of another great awakening period?
I wrestled with the idea for several days. At first I thought that maybe the country was uniting under a more religious president. But now I look back on that and laugh at my naivety. My hypothesis as to where and why this “God” thing is being pushed is simple. When the Sept. 11 attacks happened, everyone was looking for an answer when they wanted to know who did it. When news broke about the Bin Laden possibility, God came into play. The media decided to create a ploy uniting God and America over God and the Arabs or Afghans. As we kept hearing how Bin Laden felt his cause was “God’s cause” our anger grew and we accepted the God v. God scenario.
The media will try to lead you to believe that the Muslim religion is based on a different God than the Jews and Christians. This is a lie. One of the highest principles in Islam is recognition of God and his oneness. In fact, the media will go to the extent of not translating the word God from Arabic into English. You might hear about an Arabic speaker whose words have been translated into something like “Allah is great and merciful.” This is absolutely ridiculous. This is yet another media tactic that creates a feeling of separation between the eastern and western world. Imagine how preposterous it would be if a Spanish man had said the same thing in Spanish and the media translated it, as “Dios is great and merciful” or a French man “Dieu is great and merciful.”
Also, a Boston based paper had published a picture of a so-called anthrax letter. One of the lines of the letter was “Allah is Great.” Immediately I knew that it was fabricated because a true Muslim would refer to “Allah” as God in English.
We act according to what we know, therefore those who control what we know control how we act. The media controls the way we act by telling us what they want us to know. They can get us to buy “God bless America” propaganda and put them in the windows of our liquor stores. They can basically get us to do almost anything by controlling what we know.
The media is powerful and uses tricky tactics to satisfy the average American’s thirst for knowledge. For instance, if a foreign leader is responsible for ordering an armed force strike, he is labeled a murderer. But if it is done by the USA and civilians are killed and hospitals are bombed it’s “collateral damage.”
Again the wonderful media keeps telling us how terrible the Taliban is and how bad it has been but never explains why the U.S. Government set the Taliban regime into power after the Russo-Afghan conflicts in the 1980s. And it always fails to inform us as to why the US had never stepped in and intervened with the “obviously terrible” Taliban.
The media likes to rerun certain stories continuously, almost to the point where I want to scream out in insanity. For instance when the whole OJ thing was going on, it was the only thing on the news. A more recent story would have been that of Chandra Levy, the missing woman from Washington, D.C. who had relations with a Congressman. We heard that story for months. What bothered me the most about it was that there were 141 other people who disappeared in the DC area in the same week as her. What about their families, what about their pain? Does your daughter have to sleep with a congressman to get on the news? Seems to be the trend. And how could I forget the months we spent hearing about nothing other than Monica Lewinsky. Every day the same story is repeated.
The media can also blatantly lie. For example, this week there was news about Israeli tanks in the West Bank. The mass media soon reported that the tanks had withdrawn. I have an aunt that lives in Bethlehem. She just happened to have a tank sitting outside her living area a day after the news of the withdrawal broke. We should be alarmed at the inaccuracy of the mass media. And for those recently new additions to the God bandwagon who just ran to K-mart to buy a God Bless America poster, how do you feel about the fact that these weapons of mass death and destruction now parade the same roads that Jesus Christ walked on.
My basic admonition to you is that the media is going to throw a lot of crap at you. It will be those who can sort through the crap that will be closer to reaching the truth behind issues. The truth is out there, but the only way to find it is to search hard. Don’t rely on one news source. Especially regarding international affairs. Read news from websites of other countries, they will usually tell what the American media doesn’t want you to know. Why they don’t want you to know is another story, in fact, that could be an entire new column. But from now and on, when you hear “collateral damage,” “Allah” or news from across the globe, question the sources and the basis for this news. This way we will find out the truth, and the truth will set us free.
