so I told you last week, or maybe it was the week before that when corporate media makes
a big deal out of these foe in PR, inspirational stories about, you know, Jimmy did a fundraiser
for his motorized wheelchair and his classmates came through for him.
These really are not inspirational stories.
These are really primarily about a broken dystopian system that forced little Jimmy
to need to do a bake sale for a medical device, which then led to people who understandably
felt so horribly for Jimmy that they gave Jimmy some of their money.
And these stories really have to stop and fair, which is fairness and accuracy in reporting
that are really good piece about these bogus stories.
They call them perseverance porn, which is really a great name for them.
So here are some examples.
Two year old Logan Moore needs a walker.
Insurance wouldn't cover it.
Home Depot built one from parts.
Fox five DC proclaimed, this is awesome.
On Good Morning America donating vacation time to new moms is a trendy coworker, baby
shower gift.
How lovely, wrong.
It's not lovely.
Okay?
This is a terrible system that doesn't give new moms paid time off.
They can't afford paid time off and we've not decided as a society that this is something
that we're going to take care of.
There's a whole bunch of other ones that we're putting up on the screen about a 12 year old
boy who raked leaves to afford a gravestone for his friend who died of cancer, a 13 year
old boy who sold his x-box and did yard work to buy his single mom a car so she could get
to work.
These are uplifting stories of individual will in a sense like there's no doubt about
that.
I'm not denying that, but what they really tell us that is notable is how truly dystopian
our economic reality has become in the United States.
There's no need for these things to happen in the country, right?
This is one of the richest countries in the world as inspirational as we can say, the
12 year olds actions are, or as notable as the resolve of seven year old Jimmy is, uh,
in order to raise money for his mom's cancer treatment or whatever it is, a thousand times
more disgusting that it's necessary in our country.
This is optional.
Like if we decided as a country, we're not going to be allowed in a way that allows this,
we're not going to be organized in a way that allows this to happen.
That is really the most important thing to me.
So to avoid the criticism that I know is coming, I know people will write to me and say, David,
are you saying that these aren't nice things people are doing or that we shouldn't applaud
them?
It's fine.
People in bad situations, uh, should be doing nice things and we should recognize that and
it's okay to do that.
Uh, but I read this example on Reddit, which is a good one.
Someone gets caught in the rain and a random stranger gives them an umbrella.
That's nice.
Rain was the problem and the umbrella was the solution in that case.
In a similar but slightly different example, if a homeless person is caught in the rain
for years because they're persistently homeless and society simply hasn't decided that we're
going to deal with that as an issue right now and a passer by gives them an umbrella.
Giving the numb under umbrella is still nice.
But the problem in the second case is the breakdown of our systems or the fact that
they don't exist even to begin with, to deal with homelessness as a systemic problem.
That's the difference here.
Friendly 80 year olds who are mowing lawns for money, someone comes along and buys them
a better lawn mower.
That's great.
That's a nice thing to do.
But why are so many people unable to retire in our country and they have to keep working
including mowing lawns out in the heat at age 80 that's really the problem.
And the new lawn Mower, as nice as it might be, doesn't actually solve the underlying
problem.
So cover the stories, that's fine, but talk about structural issues and of course corporate
media won't.
Why not?
Because corporate media has not only a bias to sensationalism, but corporate media has
a bias towards compartmentalized acute stories that happen at one point in time rather than
systemic issues that grow or change and shift and are difficult to cover with a discreet
beginning, middle, and end.
This is why if 30 people die in a terrorist attack, that gets way more coverage than 10,000
starving African children dying because even if you fix 50% of the starving African children
problem, there would still be 5,000 kids who died that day instead of 10,000 and the story
becomes background.
It doesn't have a discreet beginning, middle, and end in the way that corporate news basically
requires in order to fill the format that they've decided is the one that they're going
to carry out.
So the the FOA, inspirational stories are okay, as long as we point out what the systemic
problems are, corporate media is not going to do that.
So at least I'll do my best to do it for you.