EDITORIAL

Gary Evans

(643 Words)

 

We occasionally find ourselves at crossroads or at familiar way stations in life where reflection and measurement of events is easy. We seem to be at such a place - one year after the KPFA lockout and one year after the birth of North Bay for KPFA.

So, where are we in this struggle?

Last summer, when Pacifica-Corporate was blasting away at the Pacifica community, it was easy to feel the blows and to watch the clumsy footwork. We now appear to have entered a period of slow moves. The forces wishing to remove our living community voice and to substitute a centralized, homogenized, synthetic, "professional sound" have leaned back in their chairs and have invited a new team of mercenaries onto the stage - the highly paid (your money) PR firm, Levisk Strategic Communications. They will work to respin Pacifica's extremely messy web. What else is new?

Our struggle to retain what belongs to us continues with a successful drive to democratize KPFA with a view toward future democratization of the entire Pacifica Foundation. The LAB and Listeners' lawsuits are proceeding, and we all look forward to witnessing the depositions of Mary Berry, Lynn Chadwick and the other Pacifica players. If you've been reading your Folios, you know that our legal concerns have been recently echoed by a subset of National Board Directors. This growing minority appears to be aware of their individual responsibility (and legal culpability) for past and ongoing cultural and financial damage done to Pacifica (see Robinson & Kriegel letter; NB4KPFA Folio V1#8). There is a price to pay.

There is also a subset of National Board Directors whose vision extends just about to the edge of whatever currency is at hand. They fail to understand that the bloated corporate giant they help to feed is blind to its toxic and oily environmental footprint. We must all keep clearly in mind that those footprints are branded across each one of us; these things are quite personal.

Our Pacifica network is the only mechanism now capable of efficiently calling people to the unfolding environmental dangers we face. We live in strange times; Earth's Arctic ice cap has thinned (melted) by forty percent over the past half century (Science1999 v286, pg1104-11 & pg 1937-39; Science 2000 v288, pg927a) and may well entirely melt over the next fifty years. The loss of the Arctic solar heat mirror (eighty percent of incident solar radiation is reflected back into space) would result in a marked increase in Earth’s absorption of solar energy and a rapid jump in the rate of land, ocean and atmospheric heating. A bell is tolling, and many of us are not listening!

What powers the corporate/industrial machine that threatens to destroy our biosphere? My guess is that Ralph Waldo Emerson was right on target in suggesting that we all suffer, to one degree or another, from reliance on property over the self. "And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem what they call the soul's progress, namely, the religions, learned, and civil institutions, as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other, by what each has, and not by what each is."

This struggle for our voice, for freedom of expression, and for the freedom to hear what others express is also a struggle for our survival. If we fail to walk strongly, unencumbered by our personal fears and our imagined isolation, this beautiful Earth may turn a more bitter face to us and become better suited to life forms who thrive in drought and in steam.

Gather your strength.