Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist
“The Messages of Our Lives”
Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris
November 18, 2007
Supersizing the Messages of Our Lives: A Dialogue:
L: We have heard so much about the supersizing of products we buy. Now we present a look at the way the messages of our lives get super-sized.
The message:
A: You are special.
L: The message super-sized:
B: You are more special than anyone else.
L: The message:
B: A woman who can cook is appreciated.
L: The message super-sized:
A: A woman better know how to cook or what good is she?
L: The message:
A: A man can be strong.
B: A man better be strong or else he’s not really a man.
L: The message:
B: It is good to try your best.
L: The message super-sized:
A: You better be perfect.
L: And here are some more pairs of messages and their over-reaching cousins:
A: Education is important
B: If you aren’t educated at an Ivy League school, you aren’t anyone.
Pause
B: Making mistakes can be painful.
A: If you make mistakes, you are a failure .
Pause
A: Money can open opportunities.
B: Money is the only key to happiness.
Pause
B: Young people are beautiful.
A: Do all you can, get surgery, take drugs, just don’t look old.
Pause
A: This is the way most people love, marry, raise kids.
B: This is the only acceptable and moral way to love, marry, raise kids.
Pause
B: It is fun to own stuff.
A: What you own determines your worth.
L: And a few more—this message:
A: Some politicians are corrupt and some government programs don’t work.
L: And super-sized
B: All politicians are useless and so is government. The only effective outcomes come from private enterprise.
L: And one more:
B: Democracy is the best form of government for the United States of America.
L: Super size it!
A: Democracy is the best form
of government for every nation in the world.
Sermon: In 1976, the bicentennial
of the founding of the United States of America and the year I graduated
from eighth grade, the movie version of All The President’s
Men was released. Four years later, trying to get into
journalism school, I wondered how many of the countless others competing
with me had been inspired by the story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,
the Washington Post reporters who exposed President Nixon’s Watergate
scandal. This movie’s message pointed me on a new path, determined
to be one of those amazing, crusading note-book slinging journalists
questing after truth.
This message was only one of the
many I received, of course. Most of them came from people I knew—family,
friends, teachers. In fact, as a young child, very few of the messages
I received came from the media. The only paper my family took was
the New York Times—a dilemma in grade school when we were
supposed to bring in clippings for current events. My classmates
could bring in cute feature pictures of baby animals and give succinct
reports on their content—“puppies were born” or “kittens
in Easter bonnets” while I would have to struggle to explain why
writers were going hungry in Greenwich Village or why oil exports were
falling short in global markets.
And then music: first 78s on our
portable player –The Magic Flute and Peter, Paul and
Mary and the symphonic achievements of another Bernstein, Leonard—and
then the radio, first with my parents, and then on my own. At a
time when other messages were confusing, popular music gave me pretty
simple ideas about how young people were to be around adults, women were
to be around men, and I got strong messages from a variety of sources
including Emmy Lou Harris, Kate Bush, Bruce Springsteen, the Talking
Heads and even, for a little while, the punk rock prototypes, the Sex
Pistols. These all affected me, though exactly how I was influenced by “God
Save the Queen, she ain’t no human bein’” is unclear
at this point….
Before Watergate, but after the
media played a large role in ending the Vietnam War, a Canadian philosopher
and educator Marshall McLuhan wrote a book called “The Medium is
the Message.” His work was widely mis-interpreted to mean
that the medium was what was important and that content was not. What
McLuhan actually was saying was that any medium, whether it be a note
you leave for your mom after school or a “mass media,” a
term just being coined in McLuhan’s day, is an extension of yourself
which puts out and takes in messages. Messages, to McLuhan were
those things that cause change—a change “in scale or pattern
or pace in human affairs”. When someone with a message uses
a medium, it enhances the messenger’s ability to transmit the message,
the same way a hammer extends a builder’s ability to pound a nail
or wheels extend the power our bodies to move. Media are neither
good nor bad, in his theory, they are tools.
Through the media around me, I received
messages which supplemented those I had received since birth from the people around
me. Some told me how I should be and others allowed me to tell
others ways I thought I should be or even to imagine myself as I wanted
to be. Some of those messages were exciting and inspiring, some
reasoned and mild, others were distorted and over-stated. Some
of those messages were positive additions to my life—others provided
negative paths, some of which I walked for a while.
In the initial printing, McLuhan’s
book went to the shelves with a typo on its cover. Instead of “The
Medium is the Message” it read “The Medium is the Massage.” McLuhan
decided that he didn’t want it reprinted because he thought that
worked just as well. He liked the expanded word-play options for
summing up his work—as being about “message,” as being
about the “mess age,” about “massage” and the
way we tweak information—and about “mass age.”
For in McLuhan’s time, we were becoming aware of the fact that we were entering a mass age—and one where media figured heavily. The FTC held hearings in 1969 about who would be allowed to own media and one commissioner said “The issue before us ought to be stated starkly. It is, quite simply, who is to retain the potential to rule America.”
Since that time, we have only come
to understand this more, for mass messages are much more prevalent than
when I was a kid and clear evidence of McLuhan’s “change
of scale” is apparent. My children and their friends are
exposed to an amazing number of pitches each day. When Liam was
2, we invented the grocery store game where you try to find the cereal
boxes that are trying to trick you.
Of course this change of scale is
not all bad— Many among us have stories to tell about the way mass
media gave them a glimpse of truths they would otherwise not see. A journalist
from this congregation told me that, in her experience, one was more
likely to have your content controlled when you worked for a family-owned
publication rather because chains often establish more professional standards. And
new and cheaper technologies such as the Internet provide the possibility
of a collective voice, virtual though it may be, for people of all backgrounds
and affinities.
As the influence of media on our
lives—and the concentrated ownership of that media—has grown,
many worry about patterns of control and conspiracy. Reporters
without Borders recently lowered the United States’ rank as far
as its press freedom goes to 58th out of 168 countries.1 I
do find it sobering to think of the huge reach of media conglomerates
such as General Electric, Sony, Time Warner, Viacom, and Disney who increasingly
control more and more of the messages in this country and beyond—ten
conglomerates generated more than two-thirds of the worldwide revenues
in the communications industry in 20002. This reach
itself has no borders, because our reach, our extensions in McLuhan’s
terms, no longer know any boundaries and one of our biggest exports is
our popular culture, the good, bad and the ugly.
With sinister exceptions such as
when Sinclair Broadcasting insisted that each one of its 62 television
stations play a documentary negative to presidential candidate John Kerry
in 2004, we have seen limited examples of outrageous abuse. Yet
the coverage of the War in Iraq has once again heightened awareness about
whose message we are getting and has made us realize that this is not
just about entertainment—these messages shape the patterns of our
lives—whether by changing our sense of individual worth or by affecting
the patterns of our experiences.
We can’t seem to control the output, so can we control what we take in? Those promoting “media literacy” aim to make us all, especially children who are so vulnerable, better consumers of the media that enrich, and clutter, our lives. This afternoon, we will be having a discussion of the principles and purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Media literacy reminds me of the fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Both suggest that, in this world, you might not want to accept the first source of truth you find. The California –based Center for Media Literacy suggests it is a matter of learning to ask a few simple questions:
Who created this message?
What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
How might different people understand this message differently than me?
What values, lifestyles and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
Why is this message being sent?
The idea is that using these questions, we can help put the messages we receive back into perspective and avoid being overpowered by messages amplified beyond reason. I think these tools are not just about the messages we get from the mass media. They can also be applied to the messages we received and continue to receive from those around us day-to-day—family friends and colleagues. Messages that we get from the earliest days of our lives—from parents and other family, from friends and teachers, religious institutions, and from the general culture of the time. Messages we use when making choices about how to be, who to be and what to do. For some of us, the idea of any kind of control may seem like censorship or small-mindedness—and yet the truth of our age is that unthinking consumption of media is to allow someone else to control the agenda.
The questions that the Center for Media Literacy invites us to look at as part of evaluating media messages are probably not a bad tool to evaluate the personal messages we get. Who created this message? Think about a message from your own life, one that has shaped the choices you have made and then try and understand the perspective of the person giving you that message. What was their life experience? What was their context? What values or life styles does this message encompass—and why is the maintenance of that life style so essential to that person or that institution? Why was this message being sent—what was the motivation of the message sender? Was it a sense of joy or fear? Despair or hope? Love or anger? Using these questions is not about exonerating others for the destructive messages they sent to us—that is a separate set of decisions—it is about freeing ourselves and those we love, from their distorted grip.
And this is important because these
messages and the environment that produces them may have a lot to say
about who we are. The mapping of the human genome, the genetic
code that governs so much of human life, has come out on the side of
nurture in the old nature-nurture debate. Yes, some part of us
is set when we are formed—and yet many other parts of who we will
be and how our life will unfold, this science has found, will be determined
by the experiences, messages, even massages, we will receive. A
recent NOVA documentary on the genome work found that people with perfect
pitch, those who can sing a note on key without any reference note, inherit
this ability, and yet it appears to only develop in people who were given
musical instruction before the age of 6.3
Mark Federman of the University
of Toronto says that people tend to miss the structural changes caused
by media—and I think what may have crept up on us is the scale
of change. The truth is that as our media has become super-sized,
one of the changes that it has brought is a distorted amplification of
messages. And in an age of globalization, our messages affect not
only the culture of this country but the culture of the world. In
fact, tonight, our Faith in Action series will hold a special evening
program on the way our country’s messages about international law
are changing the real patterns of those laws.
So why is this a matter of faith? Our religion has at its heart a search for truth and our vision for the world is undermined when messages are over-extended and super-sized. Religion is that which binds together. Our faith calls us to work toward a unity that embraces a common humanity. The messages we receive which divide us from others or which divide others from us are our form of evil. This is true whether they come from people we know, systems we live and work within or a huge media conglomerate. It is true if they are messages we receive from our elders, that we pass on to our children, or that our culture exports to the world. As people of faith, maybe we do need to have the tools to analyze the context of these messages. Recognizing that they affect us, affect those we love and those that affect the children in our lives is part of the work of building a more just and equitable world.
The messages of our lives, whether they be of simplicity or all the fret and fever of the day, do shape our days. And because of this, they need to pass through what Ralph Waldo Emerson described as the “fire of our thought”—to be judged by that still, small voice and the wisdom of the deeper mind. Only then can we truly separate what is wheat from what is chaff, and only then can we truly proclaim our own truths.
So may it be. Amen.
Benediction
Saint Theresa said, "...words lead to deeds...They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness"; and Thomas Merton: ""We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves”