A lot of my relatives that were alive in ‘68 blame the students for Kent State. And these are blue collar democrats, union labor.

I believe a lot of the political views are simple and socialistic. I’m not sure why there is all the anger. You all want change and the only things I see that came from your generation are a deterioration of morals, drugs, divorce, broken families, greed, scandal and a lot of whinning. Come on you’ve been 18 since 68 you’ve had 40 years to make your mark. The only true changes in this country came from the square’s, geeks who brought us into the technical age.

I do agree, voting is the main point here. People need to educate themselves and vote. Not to be swayed by the propaganda the media puts out. Especially as slanted as today’s media is.

Just some thoughts from a person from a different generation.

Good work–made me think a little, refocus on what we do, and how much and how little we can look to others, as in the election–the payoff is in the dialogue among all of us, starting now and going on right through the election without pause, without end–the election is only a small part of things, and not an end-all and be-all as some would have us think–as Obama pointed out, it’s not about him–he is one of the facilitators, and he seems to be good at it–could this be the first presidency of the networked nation, the beginning of shared governance, true democracy as has never before been possible?

This is a good comment.

I think I’ll go there.

Keep this in mind every time you hear somebody talking about things like tags, keywords, and positioning: We’re 50 years past Vance Packard’s blazing exposes, yet we have merely succeeded in making more perfect the manipulations, the steering and the slanting of the dialogue. When you have created and nurtured a sub-industry devoted to rewriting news/advertising/PR messages to maximize the positioning and the occurrences, you have a situation in which people are paid for hijacking the spontaneous and debasing basic truths; this analyzing and selling out of the dialogue slows progress. It allows the fakirs to dress themselves, for a while, in the robes of the righteous, until the dialogue changes once again. We merely need to be aware of this. I see it back-firing to the point where the fakirs take themselves down, having put other peoples’ words into their own mouths once too often.

I’m beginning to figure out the real reasons advertising, PR, and communications people have such substance-abuse problems: Their basic job is to fudge what they know is right, to create little disharmonies for their pittance, and most of them are intelligent enough to know that something feels quite wrong.

Here’s where the cheerleader analogy comes into play again, on that metaphor we’ve been rehashing lately. What the media cheerleaders on the sidelines forget is that they are not the action, nor are the paying spectators in the stands the action–it’s the best team members in motion on the field of real players–the risk-takers, the ones who carry the ball and take the hits–and that team can always find new cheerleaders with more upbeat cheers and new spectators who are more true to the idea of making sure nobody in any way involved in the game is left behind.

The game is now; suit up, you’re starting. Things are happening fast, and the game changes constantly. By the time the cheerleaders solicit and collate 10,000 little plays 5 days from now, the field will have changed a number of times over. Do they think we aren’t playing now, and that we’ve run through the playbook and are waiting for the cheerleaders to send in another killer game tactic? Do they think that the play to end all plays is going to be disgorged September 6th, for a $1,000 prize? It’s time to focus back down on the field, where there are vigorous executions going on.

Now, having worked through this metaphor a bit more, I see one flaw: It’s couched in the competitive parlance of the cheerleaders, which is the next phase. The first phase in what we are doing now is in fact teamwork, but it is creative, not competitive. We have had a dearth of creativity here in NEO since it last blossomed in the late ’40s, the ’50s, and the ’60s. And we must emphasize the fact that creativity is not limited to the world of arts, or crafts–some people are just so literal. Rockefeller and Carnegie were creative in an extreme way–they used what they had at hand and listened to what the world said it needed.

I guess questions I’m going to be asking myself are much as they have been–how does this create something that furthers everyone’s interests, how does this create an economy of energy and build upon prior expenditures of energy, and how does this pool the energy so we can properly put it in motion it again?

Thanks for listening.