Human Vending Machines

Twice recently I’ve done something I don’t like to do – and it didn’t feel good.

I had ordered a take-out meal from a local restaurant and by the time I got there to pick it up I had already been on hold on the cell phone listening to my bank’s atrocious elevator music for several minutes. I had one of those little wireless earpieces so you couldn’t really tell I was on the phone. I figured I could probably pick up my order, pay and be out of there without the person behind the counter knowing I was on a call. Of course just as the young restaurant worker said hello and I told him I had an order to go the bank answered my call. I’d already been on hold so long I didn’t want to drop the call so I held my hand up to the restaurant worker and stepped to the side. I saw a little flash play across his face.

When my brief call was finished I went back to the counter to pay for my order and I said, “I’m sorry about being on the phone. That is rude and I don’t normally do it and I apologize.” He looked me directly in the eyes and said, “I really appreciate you acknowledging that and saying it.”

A couple of weeks later I walked into a grocery store while talking on my cell phone via the little earpiece. Shortly into the store I walked past an elderly man who was giving out samples. He leaned forward and asked if I’d like to try a sample of the whatever it was in the little white paper sample cup.   I held my phone up and made that, “Uh, I am talking” motion with my hand. He smiled but I saw, just for an instant, that flash of rejection, that brief feeling of not really being seen.

I kept walking and finished my call. Then I went back to the man and apologized for being on my phone. I told him I thought it was rude. He was warm and gracious but nonetheless, I knew it was not my best moment.

The wrongness of my behavior seemed especially egregious because I hatethe self-check outs in grocery stores. I resent them because they cut the human element out of the whole interaction.  That being so, then how dare I take a call while standing right there within three feet of the human being working in the grocery store?!!

In my past I have worked as a house cleaner, a gas station attendant, a restaurant busser, and a grocery store checker. This was before the days of cell phones and tiny headsets but I still know what it’s like to not be seen as I am serving someone. I know what it’s like to feel the sting of being treated like a vending machine instead of a human being.

I am challenging myself not do this to anyone else again. I will not talk on the phone while going through the check out line, or the drive-through at the bank, or picking something up from the take-out counter. I will be present with all of these people who are doing things that make my life better!

No more humans as vending machines for me! Will you join me?

Cylvia Hayes

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Media Massacre

As posted on Huffington Post, June 15th, 2016

There is so much wrong with the mass violence boiling through America. There are the unresolved racial issues we’ve glossed over for so long. There is the mass proliferation of guns including assault rifles. There is the clear evidence of widespread police brutality. There is the consistent economic uncertainty and a sense of more fear, more us versus them, in general. 

The reasons for our mess are complex but one factor gets very little attention — the damage done by the current sensationalist clickbait media model. In order to try to capture ratings, clickbait-driven corporate media outlets rush to report on events ahead of, and in a more entertaining manner than, their competitors. 

I know from personal experience that this mad rush to break the news often involves speculation and results in grievous misinformation and inaccurate reporting. 

In coverage of both the terrible police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota and the heinous massacre of police officers in Dallas, the mainstream media’s manic drive to report “Breaking News” just added to the terror, the conflict and the heartache. 

With the Dallas shooting, it was first reported (as fact) that there were multiple shooters. That turned out not to be the case. There is no way of knowing how or how much the belief in multiple perpetrators affected the situation. It has since been stated that some of the police acted as they did on the scene because of the reports of multiple shooters. 

Also, in this social media age, news reporters, even big name reporters, rely more and more on tweets and posts from other reporters and from people near the scene. Quite simply, that is a completely unreliable source for factual news. 

After falsely reporting multiple gunmen, a man was falsely accused as the possible shooter! Apparently he was at the scene of the protest where the shooting occurred and, in what I would call a not so bright move, was openly carrying an assault rifle as part of the protest (exerting his right to own and openly carry as allowed under current U.S. gun laws). When the shooting started, he handed the gun to a police officer but was later misidentified as a suspect by the Dallas Police Department and his name and photo was blasted on CNN and from there all across other media and the internet. 

In studying the phenomenon of public shaming in the digital age, most of the blame is placed on social media — Facebook and Twitter — and the regular people out there who decide to go after someone. But very often, as in this case of falsely accusing someone of being a possible murderer, the biggest culprit was corporate media and professional reporters. What gets too little attention is how the current clickbait-driven media model feeds and is fed by the social media mob. 

I now say, if you are watching “Breaking News”, beware! You are not being informed so much as entertained. You are watching speculation and emotional spin-doctoring. And, you probably like it because it is carefully constructed to get and hold our attention!

As I’ve become all too aware of the incredible amount of inaccuracy, dishonesty and sensationalism in corporate, professional media, I have completely changed how I get my news. I now do my very best to avoid CNN, FOX, MSNBC etc. when they are in the “Breaking News” mode or the spun-up, drawn out “analysis” mode, which is actually just adding fuel to the fire to ring out every last bit of our attention span possible. I now rarely read, and always with a skeptical eye, corporate newspapers. 

I get my news mostly from the Nation, the Guardian, public broadcasting like NPR and BBC and a dozen issue specific, independent sources. I peruse the daily headlines in The Week and if any of the stories seem worthy of my attention I look at them through multiple media lenses. 

I feel for the guy who was falsely accused, even if I may disagree with him about my “right” to carry an assault rifle around town. Once one media outlet puts out misinformation or lies about you, most of the rest repost it as fact and there is no way to get that genie back in the bottle. He’s been getting death threats and all sorts of anonymous hate-filled messages. He fears for his safety and that of his family. Scary, scary stuff. 

Interestingly, however, in his case, it does look like the mainstream outlets are trying to correct the misinformation. The internet is now filled with stories about the false accusation and even interviews with this man. But I’m skeptical. Are these media outlets really trying to clear up misinformation or simply skewering another piece of clickbait to the hook? 

It’s true that Americans, particularly black Americans, are in danger of finding ourselves staring down the barrel of one of the countless guns our country is awash in. But as scary as that may be, I think a bigger threat is a news industry that shoots first and tries to pick up facts along the way. 

In this new norm, it isn’t news they’re breaking at all but the public trust and their sacred responsibility to inform us in a truthful, unbiased manner. 

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”- Malcom X

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Resistance to Fossil Fuel Exploitation Grows

Wednesday marked the three-year anniversary of the worst Canadian rail accident since 1864. It was an oil train explosion. A 74-car oil train carrying 30,000 gallons of crude oil rolled into the quiet town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, ran off the rails and blew up, killing 47 people.

On May 31^st I posted a piece in Huffington Post about how it was a matter of time before we had an oil train disaster on our iconic rivers in the Pacific Northwest. Three days later it happened in a spectacular fireball in Mosier Oregon on the Columbia River. Local officials have said the town dodged a bullet in that the explosion missed downtown and most of the spilled oil missed the river.

Studies report a 5000-percent increase in oil by rail in North America since 2008. With this rapid increase in traffic has come an enormous uptick in derailments, spills and explosions.   Recent studies show approximately 25 million Americans live within the blast zone of oil train routes.

Despite the push for expansion by oil companies and the challenges for local and state governments to force regulations on the wildly powerful railway industry, resistance to oil trains is growing fast.

This week dozens of protest are taking place in cities across North America as demonstrators take aim at stopping crude oil trains. Many of these actions can be seen at the tag #StopOilTrains. In honor of the Lac-Mégantic tragedy on Wednesday, environmental and climate activists delivered a letter addressed to President Barack Obama demanding companies stop transporting crude oil by train, signed by 144 emergency responders, officials, and public interest groups.

One of the most promising elements of the resistance movement is that of Indigenous Peoples exercising their sovereign nations status and treaty rights to stop fossil fuel extraction and transport projects. All across North America and South America, Indigenous Tribes are pushing back against big oil rampaging across tribal lands.

• The Lummi Nation were the lynchpin in stopping a massive coal export facility in Vancouver Washington.
• In 2015, the Lax Kw’alaam First Nation in British Columbia turned down a Malaysian energy company’s offer of nearly $260,000 for each tribal member as compensation for building a natural gas export terminal on ancestral lands. The Lax Kw’alaam said no to the $1 billion+ offer by unanimous community vote due primarily to the risk to local salmon habitat.
• The Yakama, Warm Springs, Nez Perce Tribes and Umatilla Tribes were critical in blocking a coal export facility in eastern Oregon.
• The 57 nations that make up the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians have stated their official opposition to all proposals for the transport and export of fossil fuels export in the Northwest.
• Tribal rights in Brazil have stopped fracking projects.
• The Indigenous Environment Network is working hard on these projects and issues.

I believe the expansion of the use of Indigenous Peoples’ treaty rights to stop fossil fuel projects could be one of the most important developments in the history of the movement to address global change and evolve beyond fossil fuels. I will covering it much more in the months to come.

Cylvia Hayes

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Why I Dislike the Fourth of July

The Fourth of July is my least favorite holiday but probably not for the reasons you might think. Yes it’s true I don’t like the noise and I hate it that so many animals get freaked out by it. And I don’t like worrying that the neighbor kids’ bottle rocket is going to set my house on fire. 

But what I really dislike about the holiday is that it makes me sad. It is supposed to be a celebration of America and of our freedom. And yet, this year especially, it feels hollow to me. It is hard to celebrate past victories that birthed one of the greatest experiments in democracy when our democracy is so broken. 

We are no longer truly a democracy but instead, a corporatocracy where mega-business and the uber-wealthy have rigged the system. The notion of the American Dream in which anybody of any means can work hard and cross class boundaries is slipping further and further away. 

As a nation we idolize violence and locking people up – more so than any other industrialized nation by a huge amount. We say we love our homeland but we are destroying it in our addiction to fossil fuel. Just last week the US Democratic party, while developing its 2016 policy platform, rejected banning fracking or a putting a firm price on carbon. 

I have seen first hand how the political parties are more focused on grabbing power than serving our greater good. And now we have the spectacle of this presidential campaign highlighting silver-spoon-fed egomania and Oligarchy. 

So today, instead of celebrating how we fought for freedom 240 years ago I am going to hold the vision of Americans being as committed to working to get ourselves and our nation back on track as we are to our Fourth of July fireworks and beerfests. 

I feel very lucky to have been born in the United States. I hope our kids and grandkids will have reason to feel the same. This year as I listen to the bombs exploding in air, I am going to envision those jolts waking us all up and igniting our collective drive to become a truly great, positive and loving society.

Cylvia Hayes

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