Recently I stumbled on a relatively new Website that grabbed my attention by being different. It’s called Upworthy, and it bills itself as a social media site with a mission “to help people find important content that is as fun to share as a FAIL video of some idiot surfing off his roof.” That’s something worth checking out.
I have been for a week now, and decided to pass it along to you and recommend you do the same. It’s continually updated, although I can’t tell yet if there’s a real schedule for updates or not, and has enticed me with fun and interesting images and clever text it hopes I will click. It has a sense of humor and a progressive/liberal political point of view, at least what I’ve seen so far does…but then, it does seem to be the work of young people (and you know how they can be!). They’re tilting at the windmill of an Internet composed of the following:
I agree with their premise that “things that matter in the world don’t have to be boring and guilt-inducing,” and give them credit for trying to prove the point. Give Upworthy a look yourself.
It was Friday afternoon when I saw the headline and giggled a little to myself (no need to let everyone else in on what I was doing). It struck me as funny that a commencement speaker told a group of graduating high school seniors that they weren’t special, that someone had gifted the graduates with a surprise package of honesty such as they likely don’t receive at home.
Today, I looked at the video of that speech and was surprised—pleasantly—when I found that the people who wrote headlines about the “buzzkill” commencement speaker had missed the whole point.
This is not some blowhard scrounged up to give a graduation day speech: he is Wellesley High School’s own veteran English teacher David McCullough, Jr., son of the historian, apparently a well-respected member of this upper class community in Wellesley, MA. (He’s given the faculty message at graduation before, said some of the same things six years ago!) If you watch the people in the background and listen to the other sounds, you see and hear a lot of laughter and head-nodding agreement with where he’s going in this speech—telling the students that “if everyone is special, then no one is” to shake them out of their certificate of participation-filled, everybody-gets-a-trophy world.
…we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point—and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece…
(snip)
No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it; now it’s “So what does this get me?”
McCullough’s lively and humorous talk isn’t mean-spirited at all. He is serious in telling his students that they’ve been coddled by their parents (and the school and American society, to an extent) but those days are over, but his message comes out of love for the kids, and what I think is the right-headed realization that we’ve got to wake them up and stop spoiling them if we wish them to be successful and contributing members of society.
I also hope you’ve learned enough to recognize know how little you know..how little you know now, at the moment, for today is just the beginning. It’s where you go from here that matters.
(snip)
The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you’re a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer.
And without preaching, he spreads the word: do great things but don’t do them for yourself—do them for their own sake, or for the sake of others.
And then, you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself; the sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special, because everyone is.
Last week Fox News CEO Roger Ailes said in a speech at Ohio University that “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart had told him some years ago that he (Stewart) was a socialist; Stewart was on vacation and didn’t offer any response/defense/denial. ; It seems that no one got too terribly worked up about this “accusation” against an entertainer, although I’d half expected the Fox News Commentariat to hyperventilate into unconsciousness over the revelation. ; (They may have; I don’t watch, so I don’t know what they did (or didn’t) do.)
Now Stewart’s back from vacation and last night he did respond, staking out what it is that he does believe in, absent the simplistic and obfuscatory labeling that supplies so much of what passes for political analysis today…and, naturally, he found a way to use that explanation to (1) point out the hypocrisy among the conservative extremists considered among the leaders of today’s Republican Party, and (2) make me laugh. ; What more do you need? (Click the pic)
Are you like me, do you just love the press criticism? (Of course you are; of course you do.) Well, I correspond today with news of the new location for Jack Shafer, who was laid off last month by Slate, where as editor at large he wrote the Press Box column (and other things). In fact, Shafer’s first column at Reuters is dated one week ago so I’m a couple of days late to the party, but there’s not as much to catch up on if you start right away.
If you’re new to Shafer’s brand of criticism, jump in with a look at the latest column: he’s arguing against self-described centrist journalism.
If not for media bias, I’m certain that my news diet would taste so strongly of sawdust and talc that I would abandon news consumption completely. As long as I’m eating news, give me the saffron smoothness of New York Times liberalism and the hallelujah hot sauce excitement of Fox News Channel conservatism. Anything but a menu of balance, moderation, and fairness!
Read the column—he’s not against “balance, moderation and fairness,” he’s against bland; he’s against lazy news consumers who are insufficiently critical of what they read, see and hear, and recommends we all expand our menu of news providers.
The recommendation comes from my prejudice that liberals are better at sniffing out corporate corruption and national security shenanigans and conservatives better at blowing the whistle on waste and overreach by governments. Centrist news outlets, or at least self-defined centrist journalists, don’t strike me as possessed or deranged enough to battle their way to the end of a good investigation.
I also call upon readers to learn how to hit both lefties and righties—and whatever ambidextrous centrist journalists take the mound. Media bias isn’t a journalistic problem. It’s a solution.
Shafer’s new spot at Reuters is now on my blogroll over there, for your future reference.
For any of you who had to vote “hypocrite” in the last round, take some solace in knowing that your member of Congress, hypocrite though he/she may be, can’t hope to compete with the people of Fox News. The best part is that, of course, the Fox folk did it to themselves…again. In the category “Who called who a Nazi?” last night The Daily Show nailed them not only for gratuitous and improper use of the term, and not only also for the hypocrisy of being the pot while calling the kettle black, but mostly for flat out lying when confronted about what they say on their air. Click the grey afro below; the Fox fun starts at 1:33 in.
I try not to think of it as piling on; but when I do think of it as piling on, I think, who deserves it more?
