A political cartoon I just had to share...

Don't tell me how to get there, just tell me how we got here!

One of my first autobiographical memories revolves around public television. I know that a lot is being filled in with details that I remember from later in life, but I have full confidence that I can sort what was there and what was re-constructed. Besides, even if you wanted to tease it apart, you couldn't get a collaborative method of confirming the details seeing as how grandma passed over 5 years ago, but I digress.

When I was 3, I was dropped off at my grandmother's house at somewhere around 5:30 to 6 in the morning. Anyway, grandma sat me in my little red rocking chair (that was my chair, no one else even thought about sitting in that chair) turned on this then relatively new 70-something model color TV. For some reason it was set to Channel 2, the PBS channel for our little corner of the world, mostly rural Northeast Mississippi. The letter for the day on Sesame Street was the letter 'M'. The name stuck...for several months afterward, PBS became 'M's', and everything on PBS was M's. Even if it wasn't a kids show, I watched it. PBS opened my young imagination to space creatures and Dr. Who...to news information on McNeil-Lehrer Newshour...yes, at 4 I was watching McNeil-Lehrer simply because I thought that Big Bird, Bert & Ernie, and the Cookie Monster were right around the corner. Elmo didn't come onto the scene until my cousins 7 and 9 years younger than me, respectively, started watching PBS. We had Mr. Rodgers, The Land of Make Believe, The Letter People...man I loved The Letter People, and the Art Chest, Pennywise, and the list goes on.

This is why public television and radio are so important to me. I think they were some of the best gifts this society has ever given to me. That crazy physics guy, Reading Rainbow, NOVA, Now w/ Bill Moyers: this is quality programming, and for all the good it has done me, I would hope that Congress would not remove any funding from the corporation for public broadcasting. Unfortunately, it does look like 100 million bucks will be slashed from the CPB budget forcing small rural stations like the ones I had affectionately called 'M's' to close their doors, and stations in larger markets, like the Memphis PBS station that we were able to get fairly well, will have to rely more heavily on privately owned corporations to keep their doors open.

I find it very sad that the next generation might not have that experience I had when I was 3, and for what? A billion dollar a week War in Iraq? So you could pay for 10 years worth of current funding for the CPB for what is spent in one week in Iraq?! It seems that you would want to keep public and educational broadcasts on the air for everyone's full access simply because they better educated the American public is about the rest of the world, the more they'll realize that there is no 'us vs. them'...it's just us, just humanity. Education is the essesntial element. Education extinguishes fear. Fear is the mind killer.

Education also serves to make you a better citizen. After all, remember that old adage about a good democracy: It must have an informed citizentry. How could public television, the form of television that has stayed most true to the original mandate of the FCC, be a bad thing unless of course it was speaking truth to power and doing a good job with independent media coverage. You see, fear can only operate when things are unknown. The better educated you are, the less you will fear. The more of your world you will be able to explain with your own theories based on what pieces of information you have sub-consciously deemed necessary to store in your brain.