Never Say Never

Yesterday, while on lunch break from working at Crerar and while munching on a cheeseburger from Sammy’s, I was listening to last week's On the Media podcast. It surpasses other shows on NPR in terms of intelligence, media and cultural awareness, and, most importantly, depth, by a very wide margin. It’s far more refreshing than anything I’ve ever heard on “Fresh Air” or “All Things Considered.” The former, in fact, often gives me this feeling of sadness from its blatant display of generational and class gaps—gaps that On the Media, on the other hand, excels at traversing, largely because it does not try to hide them. Although it pays attention to what’s going on in the world currently, it focuses on a specific part of a world event, especially its “representation” in the media, as well as how the media works around it, with a level of skill and proficiency that, again, is unmatched on NPR or anywhere. I know this because working in Crerar is the kind of endeavor that has made me dependent on both the many programs of NPR as well as, of course, the cheeseburgers from Sammy’s.

I think part of the reason why it stands out is that, liberal, or yuppie, or high-brow, or not, NPR still has to pander to its audience. It presents a lot of information from around the world, but there’s still a lot of condensing and synthesizing for a mass audience that’s going on. In any case, I didn’t intend to write this in order to condemn NPR in any way, I’m just trying to show, I guess, how good ‘On the Media’ really is.

There are two tensions at work in today’s media—or maybe they were always tensions in media and news throughout their history—being both entertaining, as in something that you want to pay attention to because you’re getting something out of it and enjoying it on some level, and the slightly different thirst to be informed. On the radio especially, I think this plays out in the attempt to be intelligent and informative as well as avoiding dryness. On the Media mostly dodges that bullet, but it is so good at exploring a certain media phenomena or mechanisms that sometimes it gets a little bit too intricate. But I mean that only in the sense that sometimes its analyses are so complex that they turn sort of boring and fail to sustain my attention while I’m also checking my email.

In any case, part of last week’s episode of On the Media focused on the protests in Libya, in particular focusing on OTM producer and correspondent Sarah Abdurrahman and her part in the resistance from “laptops in Washington DC.” The piece and the accompanying interview were both very good, but the point that particularly struck me was one in which Sarah, explaining the struggles of the protestors, began to cry despite her fiercest struggles against it.

I had a very sudden, almost visceral reaction: I was amazed as well as ashamed; in awe of her ability to feel so much for the struggle and for other people who were distant from her in so many ways. It was then that I decided to give myself the unattainable, impossible, and incredibly idealistic goal of never crying for myself again until I cry for someone else. Suddenly I was disgusted by the idea of feeling sorry for yourself to such an extent that you indulgently weep, for hours, embracing the action of sadness and making it an artifact separate from whatever it was that made you sad in the first place.

I did say that it was unattainable and unrealistic, but so are many goals. The next mental jump that my mind made was to realize that, in some ways, she was crying for herself. She’s personally connected to many Libyan protestors, and in the interview you don’t get the sense that she’s in Washington, DC, but in every way one of the people on the street. So you can make a heavy-handed argument for the ways in which she’s not a “self-less”

That’s a modern claim of our society, right? That there’s no such thing as altruism, that we’re all “selfish” actors and that, moreover, the world is better that way? What this segment made me think is that this claim isn’t as nasty as one might think—that the two things I’ve been trying to separate, ie, Sarah’s deep emotional commitment to the needs of others versus her own deep emotional needs, are in fact inseparable. If, in fact, there is no altruism and we’re all selfless actors, and if every single act of human nature can in some way be brought back to a goal that includes just yourself, then isn’t it all the more impressive that taking part in any kind of activism because you want to look and seem like a good person can elicit such actually good results?

I want to be a force for good in the world, I want to be the good I want to see in the world. I’m sure a big part of that has to do with my wanting to be in some way superior, I’m sure you can even make an argument that it all goes back to sex, that being an impressive person would lead more impressive people to make impressive babies with me, but I’ll take that. Even if everything I do for others is selfish—at least it’s one less selfish thing that’s turned inward.

Or something. This is all jumbled. I left my wallet at the Maroon and I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent. Wait, that makes it seem as if I don't know how I'm going to pay rent because I left my wallet in the Maroon. But it's mostly because my dad hasn't given me the money for our cell phone bill. But mostly I need my ID to check out books! Sad undergraduate life. But hey, I’m not going to cry about it, rite?

Never Say Never

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