Last night on TV Glenn talked about the need to put down social media, ignore the noise, and just get real. There are so many things clouding our vision, causing us to lose touch with our common human bond. When college kids believe it’s ok to ‘post-abort’ a baby up to five years old, something has gone tragically wrong.
Below is a transcript of this segment
I want to give you some really good news, really good news. Do you remember Brittany Maynard? She’s the 29-year-old woman who has terminal cancer, and she was the woman who publicly said she wanted to die with dignity, and so she would take a suicide pill on November 1. Well, that’s Saturday. Update: She’s now released a new video where she says she’s feeling enough joy to continue to live for now. Watch.
VIDEOBrittany Maynard: So if November 2 comes along, and I’ve passed, I hope my family is still proud of me and the choices I’ve made. And if November 2 comes along and I’m still alive, I know that we’ll just still be moving forward as a family like out of love for each other and that the decision will come later. And I do it because I still feel good enough, and I still have enough joy, and I still laugh and smile with my family and friends enough that it doesn’t seem like the right time right now. But it will come because I feel myself getting sicker. It’s happening each week.
I think this is a miracle myself, and I’m still praying for a bigger miracle that she’ll continue not to lose hope, and she’ll find more and more joy, and she will see that life even…and maybe especially in the darkest of hours is precious. We are living in an amazing world, and we’re losing touch with our human connection.
You see the woman who says I don’t care, it’s me, me, I went over to serve, I’m the one, I went over there, and I know what’s right about Ebola, and you don’t have any rights. Wait a minute, you’re putting us all at risk…possibly. We don’t know. Then this woman, how can you condemn her? You can say it’s not right. I hope and I pray that she doesn’t do it, and that’s not the way I would choose to do it, but I don’t condemn her for it, because life is precious.
Now there’s a new poll out that says college students are beginning to think about postabortion. What does postabortion mean? It means you can kill a baby up to five years old. Man alive, we’d better start grabbing onto things that are true.
I was disturbed by Carol Costello earlier this week. That’s the CNN host who actually got some sort of weird, sick pleasure out of listening to Bristol Palin describe being physically assaulted. She hasn’t apologized for this on the air, and I don’t expect her to. In fact…well, I did hope that maybe, maybe somebody would see the pleas that we made in a reasonable sort of way and say hey, this isn’t right, and maybe somebody would join.
But you know what, in the end, it might just be us, but that’s okay. The only reason to mock a Palin or to mock the Obama children…if they were being assaulted, can you imagine what people would say, and we said hey, that gives me some sort of sick pleasure? My gosh…the only reason why you would do that is because you wouldn’t see them as human because they’re just a political prop. That’s got to stop.
This week, we tried to bring the human connection back into focus. We have a lot of things clouding our vision. Social media is such a misnomer. It is making us more antisocial, and here’s why, we’re not seen truth. We’re seeing an edited feed. It’s just like reality television, except we’re doing it ourself. We’re seeing the person that that person wants us to see.
I told my wife the other day, I said honey, I’m going to start just taking pictures of you and me at our absolute worst, my son with his finger up his nose and everything else, because I just think people need to start seeing real stuff. Because what we’re seeing is only partially real. We’re programming our brains with a completely false perception of reality.
None of us will be able to hit that standard ever, and social media is clouding us, but it goes a step further. We talked on the radio today. Social media, Facebook is really dangerous. We’re playing with fire if we’re not careful, because we just get on, and we just vent. We say whatever it is we want, and we don’t think about it. We have to stop that too, and then we have to be big enough—and this is me—I have to be big enough to forgive people and look past their faults, because I’ve already made all those mistakes. I’ll probably make more tomorrow.
So we’re clouded, and regular media is clouding us too. They edit our vision of reality as well. We see so much negative, we don’t see any of the positive. Are the problems really getting worse? We talked about this with Halloween candy. Remember when we couldn’t get out, you know, we were afraid that somebody’s going to put razor blades or poison? That never happened. In our childhood, that never happened. Do you think that crime on Halloween is worse or better than it was when we were growing up? I’ll bet you you think it’s worse. It’s actually better, but we don’t think that because media.
So we’ve tried to spend the week this week to try to reconnect to human, try to reconnect to hope, reconnect to those things that will bring us to a better place. The media is going to show you the horrors of human trafficking. This week, we wanted to show you Operation Underground Railroad. We brought some guys in that are doing absolutely amazing work. They brought the video in, not seen anywhere. Why is this not everywhere, people rescuing young boys and girls from a horrible existence of the sex slave industry?
Over 100 children were rescued in this mission alone. We told you about it. Where was the rest of the media? And more importantly, this happened because one man had a vision, proving one man makes a difference. You will, if you don’t listen to the media, if you don’t listen to the social media, and you don’t listen to the crazy things that are going on in your own head saying you’ll never make it.
We see in the media the highly sexualized clothing that society continues to push on our children on all fronts. This week, we featured a panel of feminists. We don’t agree on anything, except on this one issue. What does that say? There’s a few things, and it’s our children, we can come together, and we can come together and effect positive change. And if we can do it, anybody can.
Our vision has been clouded, and we spend our whole day doing this [looking down typing]. I used to get yelled at by my wife because I would walk around the house like this—[looking down at book] uh huh, uh huh…drove her crazy, crazy. Now she’s doing this [looking down typing]. Honey, put it down. I can’t. I’ve got to get this done. How do you expect me to…I don’t know, but I’m now doing the same thing, and we didn’t do it before, and we somehow or another made it.
We don’t look up from our screens anymore. We don’t survey reality for ourselves. People who are using Facebook…and look, I’m a big user of Facebook. I like Facebook. It helps me stay in touch with you. But people who use that, they see this image, and they start to go down. Their attitude goes down. They start to think I’m not good enough. I’ll never make it. Studies show that.
We’re listening and we’re seeing everything through a filter, and it’s a filter of what someone else is telling us is the truth. Technology is not bad. In fact, I had a guy sitting in my office today who’s from Argentina. The guy is just amazing. He grew up on a goat farm in Argentina. His family was wiped out three times by hyperinflation. He works in Silicon Valley now. He is one of the giants in Silicon Valley—amazing guy.
He didn’t have any of that technology until he moved here to the United States. I mean, you want to talk about a culture shock, he lived literally five people in the mountains 100 miles away from anybody else his whole life. He remembers when his dad built a ham radio and he could hear the outside world. The guy’s like 30. It’s incredible.
Technology is not bad. Technology just may save us if we get there with our soul. Technology is good. I started a media company based on technology. We just have to self-evaluate. Run from anyone telling you that they have all of the answers. Run from anyone who is saying those people, it’s those people, get ‘em. Run from yourself or that part of you that is angry.
There’s nothing wrong with righteous indignation, but we’ve got to be in control of it. We have to be better than we ever thought possible. And we can do it. We can do it. We just need to help each other with our kids and our family.
I want to provide you with stories of love and courage. I want to provide stories where the good guys win. I’m working on some things where I think our families will start to meet together again, and we’ll start to believe that people are good and that we’re going to make it, because we won’t make it if we don’t believe it. A lot of people just want to keep you latched to the TV set. I don’t.
At the end of the day, we have to see each other as people first. We have to do our own homework. We have to question absolutely everything. We have to find our own, our humanity, and then the humanity of others. Instead of saying yeah, see, that lady is chickening out, which I know somebody has probably said that, saying oh, what a miracle, what a miracle that is. Hopefully every step of the way, think of the change that could be wrought by her if she holds on until the end, somebody who believed in taking her own life, but in the end she held on the whole way.
And don’t think darkness isn’t going to be trying to get her to make another choice. Pray for her. This is really good. We just have to not be prepackaged. We have to not be reality television or reality Facebook or anything else. We have to be real, not the perfect mold of a person who knows everything. We need to see the real person. The thing about people, we’re all really alike, and you can put a happy face on whatever it is you’re struggling with, but I know you’re struggling, and I know you’re struggling because I’m struggling. So why put on a charade? Why not just be real with each?
That, I think, has been the lesson this week. It’s the lesson we’ve tried to do this week on this program, for me, trying to find it myself, just be real. Let’s be human. Let’s go find people that we don’t agree with, and let’s see if we can connect, even though that got a little dicey. Let’s see the human in the other fellow that we happen to be seeing on screen.
