Freedom Isn’t Free

My Great Grandmother was a successful and caring woman. (She was the first goddess I ever saw.) And she loved television. My Grandmother resented her mother’s discipline like any normal daughter, but I still wonder about the influence of the media that her Mother thought so highly of.

Television was only reaching adolescence when I was a child: I watched Jacques-Yves Cousteau explore the seas, like all Americans I watched NASA finally reach the moon. With all young persons I was caught up in the potential greatness of science, of technology.

I also watched my Grandmother starve her daughters and subsequently feel a kind of guilt the rest of her life.

While I was in college I learned what it was to be watched by the media, how those in power forced their views to receive wide coverage at the expense of others.

My Mother read two newspapers a day and her Sister almost religiously followed the media. My Grandmother watched the PBS Newshour and I subscribed to the Journal and the Tribune.

I saw no change in the media! Ever. It was the advertisers interests that were always paramount, not those who subscribed.

I watched my Grandmother do everything that the media told her to do and I watched the local TV news reinforce her feelings of guilt in her old age until she died. My Aunt has no retirement, my Mother is now a child in my care and I absorb all of her media inspired cruelty weekly.

I watched Peter Jennings train George W. Bush and I watched President Bush acquire power that no President has ever attained in the past. Is it any wonder that our 43rd President is the worst President in the history of the United States?

The Managing Editor of Time Magazine now writes that freedom isn’t free. I am a Time subscriber and I watched Time’s correspondents be put in jail during the Bush Presidency. I watched Time change and it is obvious that people who can pay for their views to be printed are now a part of Time’s modus operandi.

Freedom isn’t free. Those in power are making this increasingly obvious to America. And Americans should pay.