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University of Maryland’s International Center for Media & the Public Agenda did a study,

The study’s results statement says: “American college students today are addicted to media, describing their feelings when they have to abstain from using media in literally the same terms associated with drug and alcohol addictions: In withdrawal, Frantically craving, Very anxious, Extremely antsy, Miserable, Jittery, Crazy.”

Susan D. Moeller, the journalism professor who conducted the study, noted “What they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn’t connect with friends who live close by, much less those far away.”

What’s going on here?  I suggest we look at this from a different perspective.  Kids are prolific connectors these days, sending 100s of texts a day.  They communicate everything that they see and feel and think, in the very moment that things happen to them.  This can be very healthy, in that they don’t feel their wounds alone and they do not stay stuck in their response to events.  They share almost immediately, and sharing sorrows or fears or wounds and receiving feedback helps to diminish them, making them manageable.  Then the kid moves on to the next life experience.

They share their joys and judgments and distrust and distractions and together they are creating an invisible, below-the-radar tribe.

The stereotypical ‘teen angst’ experience of feeling alone and not understood in the world is quelled by constant interaction, even though it is via computers and cell phones.  One student in the study said, “Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort. When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

Given that their usual avenues to the news were voluntarily blocked for 24 hours, did they turn to old media sources? No.  Interestingly, only a scant few said they turned to newspapers or radio, because they are used to getting their news from social media and each other.  Only the Olympics and such big events got them to turn on the TV for news.

Again, from a different perspective, these kids are used to immediate reception of news and immediate sharing of not only the news but their thoughts on it.  They are relevant within their circle of friends.  They bond together in ‘Like’ groups on Facebook, they are extremely aware of current events, as they happen, and they are interested in what is happening around the globe.

I think they are not so much addicted, as experiencing brain evolution.   Their brains can and are handling massively increased brain activity.  The sending and receiving neurons, the connectors, all are being called upon minute–by-minute as they text and update and check in with each other, whether they are close friends or online friends.  A sense of loyalty exists, not just to those few kids that they know and run into in classes or after school programs, but also to hundreds of other kids near and far that they connect with only online.   In other words, their brains are firing for people in their local ‘family’, and their regional and international ‘family.’

This so-called ‘addiction’ to social media is, to me, the best sign that humanity will continue.  Because while the old white haired guys are throwing bombs at each other and sending up spy satellites, these kids’ brains are connecting, not looking for differences.  Of course, there is still teen hate, teen judgment, teen cruelty, but their ‘tribe’ isn’t just three kids they eat with at the school lunch table.

Their tribe is the hundreds of friends they have in social media, and they clearly show compassion when they hear about and communicate about events that do not personally affect them, like the earthquake in Chile that happened while some of the students were ‘unplugged.’  The only problem I see is that the ownership of smart phones, ipods and laptops is probably related to economic strata and therefore kids within lower income households aren’t getting the benefit of these enlarged social networks.

So their brains are hyper-active, in a way that does not need to be medicated.  Their brains have brought them into larger, safer, more solid groups within which they can hopefully learn to be their best selves.  That’s not addiction.  That’s a healthy learning environment.  If their parents and educators could see from a new perspective, social media could be the glue to a new, larger, more global coherent community.

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This guy helped found the Ella Baker Center, a modern day civil rights organization in Oakland, California, providing the launching pad for  needed activist groups such as Books Not Bars and Color of Change AND he provided shelter and advocacy for families who lost their homes to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.  He wrote the definitive book on rescuing both our jobless and our environment, “The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems“.

His sin?  Once signing something that wondered whether or not 9/11 was an inside job.  And believing in a society of equality.

Westboro Baptist Church?  What have they done for a city, the oppressed, the overlooked, the homeless?  Nothing.  They show up at funerals and picket the dead, with whom they have NO connection.  They carry signs that say ‘God Hates Fags’.  They showed up at a memorial for a bus accident…  They showed up at a memorial for the Sago Mine Disaster.

They show up at the funerals of U.S. soldiers who die in the line of duty.  They showed up and one brave father sued them for disrupting his own right to privacy, to grieve his son who died in battle.

What is Westboro’s sin?  For which no one has yet caught or stopped them?  For which Conservative Pundits DO NOT attack???  They honestly believe that their hate-filled God is killing AMERICAN innocents around the world as a SIGN that we are doomed because the United States is becoming more tolerant of homosexuality.  (Forget that their Jesus said ‘do not judge’…)  The Dixie Chicks suffered more for saying ONE THING in 2003 (in the run-up to invading Iraq): “we don’t want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas”, than Westboro has EVER suffered for their far, far worse inflammatory calls to civil war.

They believe 9/11 was an inside job.  They believe that the pregnant woman who jumped from the burning, collapsing Tower ‘deserved’ to die, along with her 3700 fellow Americans murdered that day.  They don’t care if you are gay or straight, their God wants to kill you.

Where are the Conservative pundits now?  Why did they attack (like ravenous wolves) a man who stood up for the poor and the incarcerated?

Why are the Conservative pundits now silent, when a soldier’s father is forced to pay the legal bills of a pseudo-religious group that wants to incite riots?  WHY ARE THEY SILENT?

Could it be that the activist is black?  And the preacher is white?  Their base is white and Christian…

We are sitting on a powder keg.  These protests are not lawful.  They are meant to incite real violence.  Letting them scream their vitriol is like allowing the shouting of ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater.  Until now, there have been no riots, because individuals or groups like the Patriot Guards show up and buffer the crazy protesters from the grief stricken families.

We give tax exemption to anyone who claims they are a religion.  Let’s outlaw that.  Why should one portion of society not pay the costs of the society they operate within, especially when they cost us LOTS OF MONEY for increased police protection when they host these HATE events?  The Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Christ is worth $20 billion. Scientology is a rich religion.  Why allow tax benefits to nut jobs like Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church?  Let them be taxed at the same rate as regular Americans.

And where are the same Conservative pundits who ripped Van Jones to shreds, when Westboro says exactly the same thing, only crazier?

Sitting on their hands, silent.  As usual.

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Here is a youtube video for you, of their training, including burning the United Nations flag and replacing it with a Christian cross flag. Because Jesus died so they could carry guns…

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This could be seen as hypocritical, because here are four ‘old white men’ holding up funding to a program that serves a predominately minority constituency of CHILDREN, while these same four ‘old white men’ are NOT PUSHING FOR REFORM on the hundred million dollar bonuses of their ‘old white men’ Wall Street buddies.

Chuck Grassley, R-IA, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, Jon Kyl R-AZ and John Cornyn, R-TX have joined together to block further federal funding of Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

The allegations against Boys and Girls Clubs of America are:

Roxanne Spillett, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, received a total compensation of $988,591 in 2008, according to the charity’s tax filings. She got a base salary of $360,774, a bonus of $150,000 and other compensation of $83,152, for a total of $593,926. She also received $385,500 in deferred compensation, most of which went to a retirement plan, and $9,165 in nontaxable benefits.

They are concerned that:

the chief executive of a charity that has been closing local clubs for lack of funding was compensated nearly $1 million in 2008. They also questioned why in the same year officials spent $4.3 million on travel, $1.6 million on conferences, conventions and meetings, and $544,000 in lobbying fees.

Hmmm, excessive travel and conference expenses, conventions and meetings and LOBBYING FEES?  Sounds like the typical life of a POLITICIAN.  What these men do not tell you is how many officials were included in that $4.3 million travel spending, whether the $1.6 million spent on conferences were to put on one conference or fifty, and why in all fairness a childrens’ organization NEEDS to spend $544,000 to LOBBY for funding…

Here’s what Boys and Girls Clubs of America accomplish:

• More than 4 million boys and girls served
• More than 4,000 Club locations
• Locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and on U.S. military bases around the world
• More than 50,000 trained professional staff

Boys and Girls Clubs of America have helped millions of kids across America, including R&B singer, Usher.

From academic failure and gang violence to poverty, drugs and obesity, America’s youth face a daunting array of problems – with serious consequences and fewer safety nets at home and in the community. According to a 2007 BGCA alumni survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 57 percent of alumni reported, “The Club saved my life,” while another 28 percent credited Boys & Girls Clubs with keeping them in school.

“Growing up in the Club, I had the chance to experience a lot of positive things; it helped reinforce the values I learned at home including good character, leadership and giving back to my community, my country and my world,” said Usher. “It’s where I developed my love of singing and performing, received help with my homework, and it’s where I found a safe place to go after school.”

So how do we begin to have constructive change, when the complainers do exactly what they’re trying to stop?

And why do our kids need lobbyists to fight for money that is channeled to Big Banks whose CEOs’ crazy annual incomes are NEVER LIMITED?

Where is the integrity?

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I was struck by something Tom Hanks said in his recent interview in TIME Magazine:

How can Americans ask our young men and women to indiscriminately kill a shadowy enemy and then return to their ordered Coca-Cola lives Stateside?  “It’s even worse for our troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hanks says. “At least the Pacific-war soldiers coming back from World War II decompressed on ships for weeks. And then once the troops arrived portside, it was often a long train ride home to Peoria. Today these guys in Afghanistan fight in bloody hell and are flown back in 18 hours. How can they cope with that? How can they suddenly go from Tora Bora to Peyton Place?” Even the legendary Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II, suffered posttraumatic stress disorder after his return from the European theater. During one meltdown, a deranged Murphy held his wife hostage at gunpoint.

Recently, an angry Ft. Stewart soldier, Spc. Marc A. Hall, wrote a rap song about his rage at having been ’stop lossed’, forced again and again to re-enlist into dangerous war zones even though his contracted time in service had expired.  In the song, he describes revenge and vengeful acts on his Commanding Officers for betraying him and forcing him back into combat.

How is the Army handling it?  They want to ship him from the United States of America, where he is currently in military jail in Georgia, to KUWAIT!!! For a military trial.  He wouldn’t be able to put together a strong defense, because most of his civilian attorneys and civilian witnesses couldn’t fly to Kuwait to testify.  Its like he’s being toyed with, after he was toyed with for years of stop loss.

There is no mercy in the military.

So we need to find it in the civilian world.

It turns out that writing about your rage, or your sorrow, or fear, or brokenness actually helps you PROCESS the unthinkable things you might have seen or done in wartime. Author Maxine Hong Kingston has a writers group for US soldiers that has been helpful in their re-entry into their home environments. An anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace was published with these writings.

There is a courtroom in Pennsylvania that takes into account the extenuating circumstances of a soldier’s service, offering a Veteran’s Affairs mentor and programs to help.

Drugs and addiction account for a significant percentage of veterans’ crimes: nearly half of vets in federal prison, for example, are locked up on drug charges. Fully 61% of veteran prisoners are dependent on or abuse alcohol or drugs. Meanwhile, cases of post-traumatic stress disorder — many left untreated — only compound the problem.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization’s tagline is ‘For America’s Newest Generation of Veterans and the People Who Support Them’. They offer a hand to help veterans re-acclimate to their families and their jobs and their lives.

We need to UN-BOOT CAMP our brave men and women in the Military, especially if the Military will not do so.

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The mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater, now Xe, funded by right wing evangelicals, is accused of  taking WEAPONS from the US Military and Afghan Police forces,

signing them out under the South Park name ‘Eric Cartman‘…

Eric Prince, who runs Xe, has a security division, a fleet of private planes, he’s got Bush’s former head of Counter Terrorism, the man who was charged with finding Bin Laden and failed to do so and is now running a private CIA Total Intelligence Solutions for Xe.  Blackwater is implicated in the murders of Iraqi citizens, (they LOST THEIR LICENSE to operate in Iraq), in gun running, has been paid billions for its private army around the world and is considered ‘armed and dangerous’, supposedly outside the legal protection of the US military.  2/3 of their contracts with the US Government are ‘no-bid’.

And the Republicans are going to host a party for their ‘under 40′ donors at the Blackwater compound.

According to an RNC fundraising document uncovered on Wednesday, RNC “Young Eagles” — party major donors under 40 — will meet at the facility in the spring.

Its dangerous to national security when one political party parties with the assistance of a troubled private mercenary army.

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Today is a national day of protest for students:

Students, professors, teachers and unions around the country will organize today to protest America’s imperiled system of education with more than 100 events in 32 states.

The movement started in California, where the public college system has been seized by tension and dissatisfaction over proposed tuition hikes, budget cuts and a series of racist events on University of California and California State campuses.

At the same time that we’re upping their educational costs, think about this:

The founding fathers said that our national debt should be paid off every generation. They said it is immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. Today we are saddling not only the next generation but the next and the next. This is taxation without representation because we are putting our posterity in debt when they are not old enough to vote on it.

Its not exactly fair to make students pay more for the ability to discover the ways in which we’ve betrayed them.

In California, Governor Schwarzenegger wants to tie education spending to prison spending, because only 7.5% of the general fund goes to higher education but a whopping 11% goes to the prison system.

So kids, we won’t educate you, but we’ll sure house you for life!

On this day of protest, let’s give students our support.  We’d rather have them smart so they can dig us out of the mess we’re in, so they can provide GOOD FOOD to us when we’re in nursing homes in just a few decades… We’ll be in trouble if they are all uneducated or incarcerated.

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Cover of new Newsweek in a waiting room.

Just one question: didn’t the GOP just have 8 years?

Newsweek’s title is: IF THE REPUBLICANS WERE IN CHARGE…  Well they got voted out of the majority, and the Presidency.  So countering Obama’s agenda might seem like its their job as the opposition party, but its not.  When GWB was President, Dems were told to be patriotic and follow their President, which many did.  They followed him into a trillion dollar war, trillion dollar deficit and a housing implosion and lobbyist/insurer/banking explosion.

So why, one year in to a Democratic Presidency, are we wondering what the Republicans would do if they were in charge?

We see it every day, the detritus, the lost jobs, the massively increased credit card charges, the $500 million bonuses to bankers who destroyed the world (yes, Goldman Sachs, people still blame you).

Newsweek shows its death knell: NEWS and WEEK are supposed to be going together, not guesstimating what the 8 year veterans have up their sleeve.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the obstructionism, the lack of reform in the financial arena and the refusal to provide Americans with reasonable health care reform.

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I tweeted all day yesterday (www.twitter.com/marywallace) during the Healthcare Summit at the White House.  A great website, www.sunlightfoundation.com live streamed all day, updating charts next to each speaker with a list of their top career donors!  Not surprisingly, many of the Republicans who oppose healthcare reform are fully funded by insurers, banks and lobbyists.

It was shocking to hear man after man after man say, let’s get out a clean piece of paper and start over again.  REALLY?  After they had done so much work on their own bills?  DID THEY BRING CLEAN PIECES OF PAPER TO START WORKING ON THE SPOT? No.

I noticed that the overwhelming majority of Republicans were old white men (I’m talking to you Boehner, even though you’ve got that fake tan going on).  In the pockets of the insurance industry and their lobbyists.

But I woke up today to this guy’s face, it looks so shocking in its aged meanness.

Its Jim Bunning, from Kentucky, who single-handedly blocked the Senate from extending unemployment benefits for 1.2 million Americans, while complaining

‘I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00,” he said,
“and it’s the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they’re the only team that has beat Kentucky this year.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Kentucky is 10.7 percent.  With a population of 4,200,000, that’s over 420,000 unemployed.  NOT GOOD.

As I said yesterday on twitter, Americans forced their government to pull out of the Vietnam war when TV images and newspaper images of dying and dead American soldiers inundated American households.  We had believed the rhetoric from Washington, but when our own young men and women came home in wheelchairs and body bags, it was the power of the images that turned the tide in the US government’s ability to continue the war.

We are inundated these days with image after image of Congressmen who deny health insurance reform to working Americans (while covered under government plans themselves), who deny childcare to the working poor (while having it available themselves), who send other people’s kids to war while their own drink excessively underage in bars (I’m talking to you, George W. Bush).  The images from the bargaining table yesterday were predominantly old, white men.  Sure, old white men run the insurance companies and the banks and the lobbying firms.  But if you walk around any city in America, you’ll see all different ages and colors and sexes.  How did we whittle down our vision of who should represent us in Congress to one color, one age AND one sex? How did that one type of person end up in charge of everything?

Its time for new employment rules: in order to serve in Congress, you have to agree to take 1/2 the $170,000 salary until your state’s poor and homeless and lower class and middle class are stable.  The other half? It goes into a fund to counter the lobbying of your beloved insurers and banks.  You get no health insurance until all your state’s citizens are covered.  Can’t make that work? Then you don’t deserve cadillac coverage yourself.  And if you have a daughter or son of military recruitment age? They go to war until no citizen from your state is overseas.  That would stop the illegal multiple re-ups that the military is getting away with.

Seriously, to be in Congress, you should REPRESENT your people.  And I’m sure the 10.7% unemployed in his state are not thrilled with his current, very visible, choice of basketball over their ability to feed themselves.  Especially knowing that Bunning fought to keep campaign donor information hidden, and paid himself an additional $90,000 a year 2006-2008 from his FOUNDATION while donating less than that from his foundation to charity, because, you know, the Senate paycheck of $170,000 isn’t enough. His greed is shocking, in light of the funds he’s withholding from Americans and his own constituents.

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