Truth the objective, integration the goal
REDPIN swaps hats. Can a simpler method cut through all the noise?
The material in this short video concerns a meeting I had with Hamas in Gaza many years ago. Events happened the way I tell it. I cannot and do not support violence by either side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I understand it, perhaps better than most. Just remember, explaining something doesn’t justify it; and the truth, however unpalatable at times, should only ever be the goal.
WE HAVE MORE tools than ever before — and with it, a fragmented ever harder-to-reach potential audience. Is content enough? ‘Content is King,’ Izzy Asper once said, and it’s true, it’s a divining rod. Left alone good content finds its audience and vice-versa. But that was before the blessing of social media (lulz) and the curse of backroom-controlled censorship walls. Have you noticed? Reality is bifurcated. There is one branch where illusions rule and beliefs end at what we see on screen, and another where evildoers architect online schemes thoroughly intended to trap and silence us.
I write and podcast, and am never sure about how well I’m doing as the numbers fluctuate. Yes, there are golden principles to follow to be successful to be sure, and I’m not to everyone’s taste, but as well as being an outlier, I’m also a cultural ingrate: I care more about what I believe is the intrinsic value of the message than the framework it sits in.
Until, well, right now.
As the fresh video above — ‘Not In Vain’ — attests (published a couple of days ago), I’m going back to my film roots, sort of. I’ve decided to create new content that will blend smaller thought bites with sight and sound in the preferred way modern life works.
Words are powerful and necessary, but we aren’t just ears attached to brains. We are fully alive and fully sentient. It makes us human and vulnerable. Let’s face it, few of us are adept any longer at taking on information in what many now consider the truncated format of words on a page and rehydrating them through our imagination into fully wet gardens of lush meaning.
At the same time, successful podcasts are largely low morals and mostly stupid things that usually involve interviews, and not some guy (me) trying to make sense of the world out loud from his kitchen table.
There’s no getting around it: our minds are tired and attention shortened from the steady bombardment of crap; our intellects subject to ever-sinking common denominators. But the glimmer of more and better beyond that is God’s light in us is still there I believe, somewhere beneath the messy jumble of clothes on the floor and pizza boxes. It just needs to be teased out.
So, I’ll play along. But on my terms and by my rules.
In undertaking this project I’ve decided to streamline my creative to only using stock media and music, set to my original writing, and spoken by AI. Something simple enough to be heard; what I casually refer to as the ‘storied reflections of a former Catholic missionary who’s been there done that.’
And lastly, if you like what you see in the video above and what’s coming, please take a moment to share. It should go without saying by now that I can’t do any of this alone.
In Him, JMDA
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