Here is a provocative issue that I have been thinking about lately. I am sure I will upset some people, so let me hear from you and let's get a conversation going.
Of Environment:W. Clement Stone, businessman, philanthropist and author suggested: “You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success - or are they holding you back?” He further warned, “Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.”
Of this life shaping environment, the author Richard Bach suggests, “We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we resent a life we've created ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to credit but us? Who can change it, anytime we wish, but us?” Stone and Bach are not talking about where our house is located, but where our heart and mind are located and where our choices and actions are located. I want to talk about one particular environment and I will start with the physical location and then go to the heart/mind/choices/actions environment.
Into the Ghetto:
One particular environment often highlighted for its hopelessness, dead ends, and failure is the modern day ghetto. Originally, a ghetto was the section of a Medieval European city to which Jews were restricted. Today, a ghetto is commonly defined as a section of a city occupied by people who live there because of social restrictions on their residential choice. These ancient and modern versions of the ghetto are similar in that they are typically imposed on its residents. That is not the case of new ghettos, springing up in homes and neighborhoods around the world. The term ghetto is also used for any segregated mode of living or working that results from personal choices, internal (xenophobic) bias, or external stereotyping. Word Wrester Dictionary Editorial Note: Ghetto as an adjective also means “fake, imitative, improvised, shoddy” and has been used for a decade in this context.
Some writers and activists talk of the electronic ghetto. In the actual “information city,” any physical-spatial entity not connected with the internet and other forms of interchange media are considered by some a ghetto. UC Irvine Professor, Socialist Commentator, and self proclaimed Marxist-Environmentalist, Mike Davis, uses this term to describe areas of cities structurally excluded from the so-called "information revolution." They are the places that have little or no access to computer networks, to high-quality fiber optic phone lines, etc.
I agree that everyone deserves to enjoy the benefits of the internet. The digital divide is real—and in some areas—growing. There is another kind of electronic ghetto I am thinking about, however. I call it the
VIRTUAL GHETTO. It fits the definition of a segregated mode of living (although created initially by choice, not by outside pressures and restrictions). In fact it is because of a lack of restrictions (economic, availability, supervision) that this kind of ghetto is nourished and flourishes. People all over the world choose to enter this fake, imitative ghetto on a daily basis.
Ghetto Products:One product of the modern ghetto is a music genre called rap. Old school rap was often focused on good times, parties and friendship—party today for tomorrow we die. Educator and religious leader Neal A. Maxwell describes this mindset in
Disciple’s Life this way: “The laughter of the world is just a lonely crowd trying to reassure itself.” The hollowness of this paradigm is admitted in a significant departure from the no rules party attitude with "The Message", a rap song written by Melle Mel for his hip hop group, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five. The Message announces the party is over and things aren’t looking good. The popularity of "The Message" led "message rap" into hip hop history. Whether rap is informed engagement with a brutal environment, a mind numbing cadence that includes an “authentic” adversarial response to those who aren’t presumptively “connected, or another lonely crowd trying to reassure itself, it provides an insight into one potential outcome of ghetto living:
You grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate.
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way.
You’ll admire all the numberbook takers,
Thugs, pimps and pushers, and the big money makers.
The ultimate message of “The Message”—that ghetto life is so hopeless that an explosion of violence is both justified and imminent—is a ghetto mantra still popular today.
The delusional, defeating, and deleterious effects that ghetto life can have on people remind me of a lament by Albert Schweitzer: "The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives." Former Secretary of Agriculture and religious leader Ezra Taft Benson explained,
The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.Just as Christ takes the slums out of people and they take themselves out of the slums, is it any surprise that Satan seeks to inject the negativity of the ghetto into the hearts of men so they become and stay entrenched in the products of that environment?
The Virtual Ghetto:The surprise in the world today is Satan has achieved a double coup as described by Neal A. Maxwell: “Disbelieve in Satan and serve him; Believe in God and not serve Him; Satan has accomplished a double coup.” Good people actually search out the ghetto because they don’t believe there is anything wrong with the environment, or they see “a little wrong,” but are sure it won’t harm them.
What is this alluring new ghetto? It comes in the form of some video games, some TV programs and movies, and the darker side of the Internet, and other electronic entertainment and communication options available to nearly anyone, but especially those relatively affluent people that would never choose to live in the traditional ghetto. Since it is “virtual,” it can’t have the same effect, right? And if it has an effect, it isn’t much—just a little violence..., a little lasciviousness...., just some silly comments on the computer screen or cell phone... Yet smoking one cigarette won’t kill you, but the cumulative effect and the addictive nature of cigarette smoking is certainly a killer. Following this metaphor one step further, the “second hand smoke” of the virtual ghetto is just as insidious and dangerous.
A Tour of the Virtual Ghetto:The tour bus departs the Zeitgeist Station every day. Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the time” suggests that despite socio-economic, cultural, or other background identifiers, most people hold to a certain paradigm of intellectual, moral, and cultural climate—the Zeitgeist. The late 1950’s and early 60’s saw an explosion of television in a majority of homes in the U.S. A similar explosion occurred in the 1990s with internet use in the home. Today, you don’t even have to go—you can just call on the ubiquitous cell phone, or listen to it on the ever present MP3 player. Somewhere in the middle of these explosions, video games insidiously grew in popularity and power.
The convenience that they offer is not without a cost, and the cost is not often realized until many years after the device has been absorbed into society's everyday routine.
The story of modern television is a tale of excess. If the excesses were restrained, could television become a useful device, one that actually benefits society? Could television become a device that communicates and educates, instead of one that violates and enslaves?
US Census Bureau Dec 2006: 98.2 per cent of American homes have a TV set. Adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices. That’s only one of thousands of nuggets of information on Americana and the world in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007, released today.
“The Statistical Abstract is a collaborative effort that showcases our government statistics and the work of the international community, private industry and nonprofit agency researchers,” said Census Bureau Director Louis Kincannon. According to projections from a communications industry forecast (Table 1110), people will spend 65 days in front of the TV, 41 days listening to radio and a little over a week on the Internet in 2007. Adults will spend about a week reading a daily newspaper and teens and adults will spend another week listening to recorded music. Consumer spending for media is forecasted to be $936.75 per person. The Statistical Abstract includes topics as diverse as condo and mobile home sales to new tables on alternative work schedules and the North American cruise industry. Overall, the book features more than 1,400 tables and charts on social, political and economic facts about the United States, and the latest available international statistics.
Of this life shaping environment, the author Richard Bach suggests, “We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we resent a life we've created ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to credit but us? Who can change it, anytime we wish, but us?” Stone and Bach are not talking about where our house is located, but where our heart and mind are located and where our choices and actions are located. I want to talk about one particular environment and I will start with the physical location and then go to the heart/mind/choices/actions environment.
One particular environment often highlighted for its hopelessness, dead ends, and failure is the modern day ghetto. Originally, a ghetto was the section of a Medieval European city to which Jews were restricted. Today, a ghetto is commonly defined as a section of a city occupied by people who live there because of social restrictions on their residential choice. These ancient and modern versions of the ghetto are similar in that they are typically imposed on its residents. That is not the case of new ghettos, springing up in homes and neighborhoods around the world. The term ghetto is also used for any segregated mode of living or working that results from personal choices, internal (xenophobic) bias, or external stereotyping. Word Wrester Dictionary Editorial Note: Ghetto as an adjective also means “fake, imitative, improvised, shoddy” and has been used for a decade in this context.
Some writers and activists talk of the electronic ghetto. In the actual “information city,” any physical-spatial entity not connected with the internet and other forms of interchange media are considered by some a ghetto. UC Irvine Professor, Socialist Commentator, and self proclaimed Marxist-Environmentalist, Mike Davis, uses this term to describe areas of cities structurally excluded from the so-called "information revolution." They are the places that have little or no access to computer networks, to high-quality fiber optic phone lines, etc.
