Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed official guest host Grant Henry in the studio for another edition of Grant’s Rants.
Grant Henry:
Tennesseans, you have to get your friends and families involved in politics.
Now, during the State of the State address last night, you heard Governor Lee say Tennesseans are what makes our state exceptional. He referenced Reagan’s farewell address where he gave a warning to the American people, saying, what we want in this country is an informed patriotism.
Actually, ‘If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. A mourning of an eradication of the American memory that could result ultimately in the erosion of the American spirit.’ And this got me thinking, ya’ll, about where we are right now.
Right now, we have a Republic if we can keep it – but we are on the verge of losing it.
We must fight tooth and nail with every fiber of our being every single day to keep what we have. And we must be aware of what is happening to us.
Complacency can rot our nation from the inside out, and we are just now starting to awaken from the fog that draped over this country for decades. In the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman compares two literary dystopic visions. One, in 1984, Georgia Orwell warned about a tyrannical state that would ban information to keep the public powerless.
However, in a Brave New World, Huxley depicted a population too amused by distractions. Entertainment, leisure, and laughter to realize that they were made powerless. Postman argues that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984 but rather, we have become numb and drifted listlessly into Huxley’s Brave New World.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. You see, we would become overwhelmed, focused on selfish pursuits.
Complacency would kill our conviction to make change. Orwell feared that truth would be concealed from us. Huxley, however, felt that truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell, what he feared, was those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one that wanted to read one. We are living in Huxley’s Brave New World. President Donald Trump shook this country awake again like a chlorine shock to an algae pill full pool.
Trump cleared the fog so that we could see the reality of our situation. And in Plato’s allegory of the cave, Socrates describes a group of people that live in a cave and are chained to the floor. They are forced to watch a blank wall.
These people watch shadows projected on the wall in front of them, and those shadows are coming from objects that pass in front of a fireplace behind them. They give names to these shadows. The shadows of the prisoner’s reality but they are not the representations of the real world.
Occasionally, someone will be wise enough, aware enough, and lucky enough to look behind them and see the fire. They glimpse the reality and they exit the cave to encounter the true sun, the real reality. But this is not the end of the story.
Plato goes on to say that those that exit the cave have an obligation to go back into the cave and save the other prisoners. You see, we are duty-bound to show them reality. So, too, it is with our current political situation, many of us no longer have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines.
It is no longer enough for just you to get involved and for you to stay informed. For those of you that are wise enough, aware enough and lucky enough to see our political reality for what it is, you must begin to recruit your friends and family and fellow Tennesseans to get involved and stay informed.
You must go back into that political cave, shake the populace awake. You must do the hard work of convincing your fellow man that this fight is worth fighting.
That we, in the next few years, have the chance to shape the next few decades. Like Paul Revere riding into the night, you must shake society from its slumber and we must never allow ourselves to be rocked back to sleep again.
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
