Repost from 2014. Before social media added to the erosion of self…
Image by Banksy. Text below by Kalle Lasn, Founder of Adbusters Media Foundation. Source: ‘The Gruen Transfer’ book.
“Rather than child proofing the world, we need to world proof our children” *
“There’s anything between 1000 and 3000 marketing messages entering the average brain every day. I believe our brains are simply not capable of absorbing that level of advertising. One of the reasons advertising causes mental illness is because of the weight of that onslaught, the sheer number of hits to the brain.
And then, on a secondary level, many ads arepsychologically abusive. Many ads amount to emotional blackmail. Ads point out flaws in your personality, in your body, in the way you dress, the way you live, and then once they have made you feel inadequate, they say, ‘Okay, we have the solution to your problem. Buy this.’ If this happens consistently, it erodes your self-confidence and turns you into an anxious human being.
…in a land of smiles, bad things happened. Children were broken into. Nothing said. Nothing done. And so the innocent grew, not up, but small. But this was not to be the end. In the darkness little helpers gathered spilling rich black into soft white sheets. Tailoring picture books to fill empty spaces. Telling truth that grew much taller than a world too big to fit. Until size no longer mattered and little souls were reawakened by the rhythms and rhymes of songs that carried them all the way home – ensuring they’d never be beaten again.
Sometimes you have to find a way of separating the badness from your self .
There are so many of us who have been given a bad apple. It is the worst thing in the world to receive. Just like having a bad apple in your bag, it rots – eventually ruining everything. This little soldier has a story about ‘outing’ bad apples – and rising from the ruin …..
… Someone put a bad apple in her bag once, and although she was sure people could tell something was wrong, she didn’t show anyone the apple because it was so bad – and she worried it would make them feel bad too.
The little girl’s greatest fear became that if she ever took the bad apple out, or someone discovered it, they wouldn’t want her anymore. They’d think she was bad. She forever longed for someone to get rid of the bad apples for her.
On most days, she wished the bad apples had been put in someone else’s bag.
Hey first I wanna say really like your music i have lost my beautiful wife in cancer and my dear brother in covid 19 my question to you is how keep you going on after lost your son its hard sometimes to keep going on with life.
There is little to say to someone who has lost a loved one that is of itself any real help. That has been my experience. Language falls short before the immensity of the experience of grief. There are simply not the words. My well-meaning and desperately worried friends would speak into my grief, using words that made no sense. They would tell me that my son lived in my heart, for example, but I genuinely did not understand these words because when I searched my heart I found nothing but chaos and despair.
One desperate morning, however, I did the most simple of things and perhaps this can help you with the loss of your wife, and your brother, more than my words. I sat by myself, in a quiet space, and called upon my son by name. I closed my eyes and imagined lifting him from my heart — this tormented place in which I was told he lived — and I positioned him outside of my body, next to me, beside me. I said, “You are my son and now you are beside me.”
You’d never be trodden on again. You’d be able to see exactly what was coming. Where you were going. And always have a safe place to fly up, up and away from it all.
Footnote: Sometimes imagining we have super powers or a super power watching over us can get us through a tough spot (Mary Poppins ‘spit, spot’ comes to mind). Wings on feet? Astro Boy? Maybe it leaves her hands free? To do what? Take the world off her shoulders perhaps? But there’s no world in the drawing? Maybe others can’t see how much the weight of the world affects her – she feels it alone. Or could it be a muscle man (woman) pose? Flexing her muscles and being strong? Or it could be a shrug – ‘I don’t know, don’t ask me? I don’t have all the answers.’ And with wings on her feet she’s forever safe from falling – being hurt. Up, up and away is such a comforting thought when things get tough.
