A Time For Choices
I’ve just been reading Michael Tom’s excellent book “A Time for Choices: Deep Dialogues for Deep Democracy”. Michael is the co-founder of New Dimensions Media, a major radio broadcasting network based in California, and he has been interviewing some of the world’s finest minds for the last thirty years. So when he interviews people for this book we recognize immediately that he is no newbie to this task, and that he’s not looking for easy feel-good responses before the ads roll.
The book is a series of interviews in response to 9-11, and I have to say the intelligence, the open-ness and the insight of the views we see here is way beyond anything in the popular media. As I read I was aware of the calm thoughtfulness of the views being aired. No one was promoting a definitive opinion, or attempting to ‘tell’ us anything. All of them were asking us to think, to wonder, and to question what the options might be for moving forward. How different this is from that headlong rush to war that was throughout the press at the time! And, perusing these pages, I was struck again by how our TV presenters, even the good ones, tend to hector us. They almost yell at us from wherever it is they happen to be reporting from, and of course they rarely have time to go beyond the surface. This book truly is a way to begin thinking anew; it is about dialogue, not arguing (which is most of what we get treated to on tv) and it’s a skill we seem to have lost sight of.
Some of the people who appear in the book will be familiar, some less so. All are first rate thinkers - Howard Zinn, Jean Houston, Marianne Williamson, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Jane Hirshfield, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Moore, Sogyal Rinpoche… and many many more. It made me realize how tired I am of tv talking heads who always have an answer and who always have to prove someone wrong so they can be right. Real discussion is not the same thing as those boxing matches/slugging fests we have shoved at us in the name of ‘opinion’.
Democracy depends upon people thinking. Thinking sometimes takes time, and care. Until we do more of that sort of thinking in our public discussions we’re not going to be much good at democracy no matter how much ‘freedom’ we have, or force upon others.
