I doubt when the Founding Fathers considered creating a democracy where an informed public decided its political, social and economic destiny, they had any inkling it would end up more interested in insipid gossip than real debate about what would affect the lives of those whose opinions and decisions would direct the fate of a nation and its people.
But here we are with more ink and video spent on Paris Hilton, Anna Nichole Smith and other irrelevant trivia than on whether we are willing to feed the homeless, educate our children and clean up a world we are polluting into oblivion. Why bother discussing these important, complex and critical situations when we can bury our heads in the sand and argue about whether Paris should do 45 days or 23 days in jail for being an over-hyped and talentless party-girl and thus wreaking havoc on the values of hard-work and responsibility we try to teach our children?
As Rome burns and the dream of a well-informed public drowns in this nonsense or the corporate take-over of the press, rendering it little more than pandering and propogandizing for the powerful and wealthy, we sit idly by. Democracy can only work if the people who are given the awesome responsibility of self-governance know what they are doing when they make their choices.
To remedy this, several on-line sites, including Speak Out California, are committed to providing information and honest discussion about just what IS happening in the halls of power; just what financial and political decision-making is taking place with our hard-earned dollars. To ensure that more Californians have access to that information, we've initiated what we hope will be a weekly (or bi-weekly)summary of the goings-on in our state capitol. We're calling it, " While California Dreams ". We launched our first edition this past weekend and hope you'll take a look at it here http://ga4.org/speakout_ca_dreaming/notice-description.tcl? newsletter_id=10533153 For the reasons discussed in this blog, we think it's very important to provide an alternative to the cut-backs we're seeing in the mainstream media as it down-sizes to increase corporate profits.
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