Your Insignificance Will Be Televised

Allison Kilkenny at The Smirking Chimp writes in Your Insignificance Will Be Televised:

The national media is quick to remind the American citizenry that their opinions don't matter.

Meanwhile, moments of democratic triumph go largely unreported. Take, for example, residents of California voting out all five members of a local planning group that had backed plans to allow Blackwater Worldwide to open a training camp in their area. Blackwater claims they hightailed it because of noise regulations and not the angry battle cries of the California residents, which is a lie. If the California residents had warmly embraced plans for the mercenary training facility, Blackwater's merry engineers would have rushed in overnight to start building. It was only the will of the people that prevented this from happening.

Not only is she giving a shout out to the anti-Blackwater activists in San Diego, she's making a great point about how corporate media perpetuates a culture of insignificance and victim hood that makes people more inclined to just lay on their sofa and take what ever an "uncaring government and corporate elites" have in store for them.

Americans have been conditioned to believe protest is a silly waste of time, that being a fringe candidate like Ralph Nader is annoying and bothersome, and that they are weak, helpless creatures that will forever be exploited by our big, evil government. They must accept, says the media, that their votes will not be counted, that their children will receive a poor education and poorer health care, and they will either die beneath a mountain of debt or from the retaliation of rebels reacting to our government's retarded foreign policies. Any way you spin it, the message is clear: You are all fucked. Stop trying.

Except, that's not true, and Americans know it.

She's right. We can stand up and said no to the Powers That Be, and in the end, will prevail. The onslaught may be inevitable, but we don't have to just accept whatever corporate interests want to shove down our throats, and we know it. Just take a look at what happened in Potrero.