Tragedy Coverage Social Taboo-Talk About Death-Podcast 668

Tragedy Coverage Social Taboo-Talk About Death-Podcast 668

Shootings. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Floods. Lots of talk about what happened. Not much talk about the actual experience of death. That’s because Death isn’t easy to talk about. I do in Tragedy Coverage Social Taboo-Talk About Death-Podcast 668.

Overwhelming Tragedy Coverage

Check your social media feed. Turn on TV. Listen to the radio. There’s an avalanche of talk about the events surrounding a tragedy. What happened? How did this happen? Can it be prevented from happening again? From comedians to news reporters, it’s mostly people trying to remain relevant.

Nobody Talks About Death

In all of the coverage no one wants to talk about the experience of death. Death as a concept. The reality of death. Fact is, we live with death and we have an experience called death. However, we don’t ever talk about it. Death as a subject is not okay. In Tragedy Coverage Social Taboo-Talk About Death-Podcast 668.

What Is Death?

Death is the total and permanent cessation of the vital functions of an organism. We don’t really want to talk about that so we find other things to talk about. How do we deal with the shock of the unexpected, unexplainable and irreversible?

We Don’t Know How It Feels

Why do we grieve the death of the famous and barely pay a second thought to the deaths of hundreds in an earthquake in some other land? How is that different from how we react when someone really close to us dies? Talk about it in Tragedy Coverage Social Taboo-Talk About Death-Podcast 668,

Sharing My Experiences Of Death

In this podcast I share my own experiences. How I reacted to recent deaths of people very close to me. People who died unexpectedly.  This is in the hope that subscribers and listeners might think about and share their own stories and their own experiences with death. This is not easy to do. Talk about this is not a judgement.

We’re All Gonna Get There

Sooner or later we’re all going to have the death experience. Seems like everyone has different ideas about what actually happens. Death remains the great mystery for all of us. When you talk about death you have to talk about life. Do we regard life with the same wonder? Is life the same amazing mystery to us? Why not?

Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul

Tragedy Coverage Social Taboo-Talk About Death-Podcast 668

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Podcast 446

Media Manipulation. Checking out the news cycle before and after the debates, and in the last few weeks it sure feels like we’re being manipulated. You can’t say anything about anyone these days without a stream of tweets and posts about what’s politically correct, or charges that ‘you’re in the tank’ for this or that candidate. New story lines about Donald Trump are actually laughable. After his comments on the San Bernardino Terror Attack (not the San Bernardino shooting, as Hillary Clinton likes to characterize a terror attack) Trump was a racist, a fascist and a demagogue. Now that a new poll has been released showing Trump breaking through forty percent, with his closest challengers as much as twenty points behind, the story line is its the fading middle class, or dumb white high school only ‘blue collar’ workers who support him. Or, that Ted Cruz is suddenly ‘the nominee’ because he beat Trump by one point in a poll in Iowa. Because people in Iowa don’t know that they’re being surveyed, interviewed and chronicled to death as they ‘pick the next president’. Meanwhile not a vote has been cast. Kudos to the Cruz campaign for working hard in Iowa but let’s not forget Iowa (which is somewhere down there between New York and Los Angeles, for those of you in the media) Republicans voted for Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012 and gave Michele Bachmann a big boost in the Straw Poll in 2012. Were any of those people the Republican nominee, or even president? At the same time, almost no ink has been devoted to Hillary Clinton’s compulsive lying or Bernie Sanders’ fairy tales about how to fix the economy, or solve all of America’s social problems with another government program. While the pundits and commentariat blabs on and on trying to predict the future, manufacturing is in a recession, government and corporate debt are at record levels, companies are merging to pump up their fourth quarter earnings, Chinese officials admit making up economic numbers, commodities are depressed  and the Fed is about to raise interest rates. Iran has pulled its troops out of Syria because they’re getting their ass kicked by ISIS, which by the way is expanding into Afghanistan where they will get an assist, no doubt, from the guy we had locked up in Gitmo, but let go to get a deserter back. Don’t worry about that right now though, Anderson Cooper is on talking about Carly Fiorina’s dress, Donald’s smack down of Jeb! and the Cruz Rubio rivalry. Hey did the Wild win? Maybe we’re better off with astrologers. As long as its Vedic astrology, right? Sponsored by Pride of Homes and Luke Team Real Estate and Hydrus Performance. 

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Podcast 442

God Isn’t Fixing This. In the wake of the San Bernardino shootings we’re left as confused as ever, and the media treats every single shooting as a one-off single story, rather than a series of shootings in an ongoing struggle. It makes talking about it difficult, yet this is what people are asking about, as 24 hour coverage drives home the media favorite story-line of the moment. Everyone followed the President as he climbed aboard the ‘workplace violence and guns kill people’ train, but surprise! That train derailed just outside the station when facts surfaced suggesting something more sinister and dangerous. We’re still being told, “avoid the rush to judgement”, and “it may still be a workplace violence issue”. Trouble is, like the Fort Hood shootings a few years ago, evidence shows the San Bernardino attack was premeditated, with detailed preparations including, legally obtained weapons, even with California’s ‘assault weapons ban’, stockpiles of ammunition, pipe bombs, communication with people on terror watch lists, destruction and cauterization of communication and social media links before the act with similarities to attacks in Paris and Boston. While the ‘thoughts and prayers of the nation’ are with the victims, guess what? God Helps Those Who Help Themselves. There is a war being waged for our minds and the minds of our attackers. It is waged though propaganda and media. The weak succumb to its charms, and the fears it generates. Only the strong will protect, persevere and prevail. Are you strong enough? Are we strong enough? Clearly our leaders aren’t that strong, because if they aren’t mealy mouthing thoughts and prayers, they’re trying to pass gun control legislation or spend more money on mental health research. What’s that you say? Strategy? Foreign Policy? Addressing the problem? Expecting real leadership is apparently too much to ask of the denizens of Washington. We depend too much on our leaders to show us how to be strong, but it seems as though we’re going to have to show them how to be strong, because apparently they can’t do it. These kinds of terror attacks are a cancer that is spreading, and it will get worse. Its causes took decades to develop. It can’t be solved with a campaign slogan or some rant on a talk show. Sponsored by Pride of Home and Luke Team Real Estate and Hydrus Performance. 

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