This new year started out with a bang and if the events of
the first month are any indication, its gonna be vivid.
Culture wars and censorship have set a tone for
circumspection and introspection. A heretofore barely known (in the US)
newspaper is bombed in protest of a continuing disregard of religious
sensibilities. Why does freedom of speech trump deliberate provocation to inflame and result in a loss of life?
On the same day as the Charlie Hobad bombing, a local NAACP
office was bombed in Oklahoma amidst the background of an emerging dialog on
race in America that the nation goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid and a
history of law enforcement penchant for killing unarmed people of color. Due to
the mantra of mainstream news - “if it bleeds, it leads” - because there was no
carnage in Oklahoma, it received next to no news coverage.
Sounds like homegrown-terrorism to me.
Ten years ago, before Facebook and Twitter, this routine
disparity in news coverage would barely raise an eyebrow. Today we are in a
radically different paradigm. And yes, Gil Scott Heron was correct, the
revolution was tweeted, meme'd and hash-tagged.
Millennials, raised in an evolving world of technology and
telecommunication, have significantly changed the game. While flipping the
script, they've set new rules and agendas through unity and a common cause
without old-guard Civil Rights leadership. They've established a new paradigm
evidenced by the on-line grassroots movement that put Trayvon Martin's murder
on the national radar.
Due to the immediacy of new media, behaviors of mainstream
media are thrust in the spotlight by virtue of the raw, unfiltered first-hand
dispatches, direct from ground zero. Recall Eric Garner. The conversations
surrounding #Icantbreathe, #handsupdontshot and #blacklivesmatter
occur because Black millennials bum-rushed it front and center.
They aren't waiting for permission from perennial civil
rights leadership. And they aren't asking for it either. Read your Bible “and a
little child shall lead them;” that kid has grown up.
The brave new world has arrived. Deal with it and get out of
the way.
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