Channel Surfing in the Land of Steff

Every now and then, the cosmos screams at you that you’re doing the right thing. How do you know? It’s when everything seems to seamlessly fall into place.

This week, I reached financial rock bottom. Three days in a row, I cried. I sucked it up and forced myself to get out each day and paste flyers around the university closest to me, UBC, for my English as a Second Language tutoring. (And yay for GayBoy, he helped yesterday. Good friends rock.)

Suddenly, I have things on the horizon. Good things. A couple promising clients.

Suddenly, self-employment seems like a brilliant option. I love the challenge of fending for myself, the autonomy of it all, and the opportunity to juggle things. it’ll be neat. I’ve done this before, just not for a long, long time.

I’ve also always been lousy with money for much of my life. Until this summer. Necessity is the mother of adaptation, or something like it. I’ve never been more prepared to make a serious go of self-employment as I am now.

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Let’s hear it for the media.

Finally, they’ve been doing their jobs. Calling for Bush to accept accountability, playing “the blame game,” as the administration likes to call it, they’re finally doing what they should’ve been doing for at least the last couple decades.

Somewhere in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, the media just began swallowing what the talking heads were spouting. They stopped questioning the spin doctors and just believed everything that was spun for them.

Michael Brown’s a good director of FEMA, despite having lied on his resume, despite coming from the Arabian Stallion Oragnization, or whatever the hell it is? SURE, they said.

Back in the ‘70s, the media would’ve exposed the laughability of Brownie being a director of an organization responsible for saving the lives of natural disaster (and otherwise) victims. In 2003, they just nodded and announced the news, and never investigated a thing. They could’ve stopped him from receiving the appointment. They didn’t.

As much as I applaud the media for their sudden realization that they have JOBS to do, I hold them partially responsible for the deaths of those in New Orleans. I hold them responsible for not questioning Brown’s appointment. For not questioning Bush’s moves in Iraq. For not really exploring all the terrible news and issues that have come to light in the last six years.

The media has been asleep at the wheel, but they’re waking up.

The reality is, the people NEED the Fifth Estate. They NEED the media. The media is that light in the fog of the public world. They’re the decipherer of the political code. When the media fails to do its job, the public is ignorant, and bad electoral decisions are made. Decisions that impact far more than just the next four budgets.

Now a man who cares so little for the American poor that he neglected to act for the better part of four days after the greatest natural (and unnatural: the levee failure) catastrophe ever seen on this continent is responsible for picking a Chief Justice and a Justice on the Surpreme Court, both of whom will play a sizeable role in the future of the American constitution and the doling out of rights and privileges to the masses -- for DECADES to come.

Good fucking call, folks. And you can thank the media for their apathy during the last election.

But thank god they seem to be back. For how long, though? One can only wonder.

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I was watching the telethons for Hurrican Katrina victims earlier.

Let’s hear it for the magnaminous television stations and their pooling together of resources to air these widespread telethons for those poor fucking people.

Is it just me, or are most people failing to realize that the networks have chosen what is inarguably one of the weakest time slots in the week for airing these telethons? Friday, at 8:00. Oh, yeah. Way to seek a market share for the dead and homeless, network people.

It’s pretty bad when the spokespeople have to say at least once, “If you’ve TAPED this...”

God forbid they lose actual advertising revenue or anything.

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That said, there’s never been a natural disaster that has more deserved a musical concert for a fundraiser. There is no city that better evokes music than New Orleans. Pick any city in the world -- none of them will match the musical colour and history of NOLA.

From blues and jazz to soul and rock, NOLA has it covered. It’s all about the music, baby.

There are bigger cities, flashier cities, more far-reaching cities, but there is no city in the world more capable of bringing a smile to people’s faces and a tap to their step than New Orleans.

And to see the stars come out and lay their voices and their soul on the line for the good folks of New Orleans and Mississippi and the heart of America like they have, there’s just nothing more fitting than that.

Get on board, baby. The train’s a movin’.