It's our turn now

“I gotta tell you, these people are crazy…the furthest left people in the face of America,” Bill O’Reilly told his loyal fanatics about the 3,500 illustrious journalists and activists who attended the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis last weekend. He was trashing people like press legends Bill Moyers and Dan Rather, Sen. Byron Dorgan, FCC member Jonathan Adelstein, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, Nation editor Katrina van den Heuvel, award-winning blogger Ariana Huffington, Stanford genius prof Larry Lessig, novelist Louise Erdrich, True, and lots of other very, very smart people. All of them are dedicated to a free and independent press, guaranteed in our Constitution but decimated by corporate media owners and their hate-mongering shills. Thanks to Murdoch-style media consolidation, 2,400 senior journalists took buyouts last year. Now these folks don’t have to be censored by their bosses any more and they are making the most of it.
For once BillO didn’t have the last word. He made the fatal mistake of sending a reporter to videotape the conference, and Noah Kunin from The Uptake followed this Foxy guy around. There was a stellar scene when Bill Moyers called O’Reilly a pugilist and a blowhard, but not a journalist. The time of hate media is so over. True is so overjoyed. You can catch this magic moment on YouTube. Find the link at http://www.freepress.net.
Scripture tells us that the Last shall be First. And so, I’ll begin this story about the conference at its end. The charismatic closing speaker Van Jones told the wowed crowd, “It’s our turn now. It’s 40 years ago this weekend that we lost Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Van predicted that Barack Obama will win in November but will not necessarily win a second term unless the deep, deep crises of poverty, energy, war, media consolidation, and the devastating and rapacious corruption of the “Dragons on the Right” are addressed in his first term. Van says FDR’s New Deal has to be the model for change that addresses our 21st century problems of poverty and global warming: put people to work providing green energy solutions like the New Deal put people to work rebuilding America’s infrastructure.

Van asked his joyous and energized closing audience to do five things in the service of a pro-democracy movement to save the First Amendment. “We need to unleash the best in the country. The stakes are high, high.”
One: Hold the new President accountable, but HOLD him too.”
Two: Move from agitation to education; there is no longer only one right (PC) way. Meaning that the movement needs to embrace all people of good will and not only the ones who name everybody else as sellouts.
Three: Keep us united. We need each other, need ALL the Democratic leaders. The Clintons and the Edwards and the Kennedys, we all can work together.
Four: Don’t give up on your ideals in the face of challenges and setbacks. Tell the naysayers, “We have plenty of money—strip it out of the Pentagon budget, take it from the jailers.”
Five: Remember how it was after 9/11 when people turned the flag into a war flag, how lonely it was; remember the sick Reality TV of Hurricane Katrina. Remember when we didn’t have any power. Remember when homophobes divided our families and created shattered young suicides in the name of Family Values.
“Those days are over now. Everybody in the Family has Value. We get to be the people now:
Big now.
Wise now.
Proud now.
“We will finally, 40 years later, be the generation NOT to ‘Take America Back,’ but that takes America forward.”
And to cheers and tears and shouts and hugs and promises and hope, the fifth National Conference for Media Reform came to a close.