My memory is going! What's Happening in Archland: Miscellany

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Damn.

About ten times a day I get a brilliant idea for a post, and by the time I sit down at the keyboard, I have forgotten it.  This is the first time in a while that I have remembered, and it's about forgetting!!!!

Some of you probably know that I have a program on a Community Radio station, and in a small town like ours, this means that this is almost the only station in which minority folks have some control over the programming.  So there's Hip Hop (which a lot of middle class white youth listen to, but in our conservative community it's still considered black music), classic soul, mellow soul, cool soul, Disco, and so on.  Suddenly, classical music is sticking out like a sore thumb on the programming.  You get a very good idea as to what minority folks are up against everywhere.

A lot of the time, it is a huge battle to prevent some of the volunteers who have come on board from wanting to exclude everybody else from having some control over the programming, and how it's run.  Sometimes it's minority folks fighting to hang onto their cultural turf, other times it's white Middle Class folks who resent what they see as a wholesale slide into the station becoming dominated by non-white volunteers.  We seldom realize how much our mental image of what we expect the Radio Station to be, colors our decisions, often unrecognized by us.  Often, too, we assume that everyone's mental image of the Station is our own, and it is difficult to communicate our image to anyone else without appearing to have a cultural bias of some sort.

Health Care and Health Insurance are major topics in the Talk aspect of our station.  A major syndicated radio show is hosted by someone of whose existence I was not aware: Rick Smith.  He's on in the late afternoon, and at lots of other times, and from all I have heard, he seems to have really sensible opinions, and his correspondents have interesting and reliable and timely information.  Generally speaking, Rick Smith is right plumb spang in the middle of the Left, though I haven't heard his opinions on Health Insurance.  But I would imagine that he has a healthy distrust of any sort of insurance company, but I suspect that, having been born and raised in the US, he would regard Insurance as a necessary evil, whereas I regard it as just an evil.

Many our people at WXPI are innocent, religious, heart-on-sleeve folks, all about prayer and kindness, and most of the others are street-smart, suspicious idealists, if there is such a thing.  Some others are Charlie Browns: "I love Mankind all right; it's people I can't stand!"

Generally, as you can imagine, since our Station is generally about giving the underdog a voice, our volunteers have generally a liberal bias.  There certainly are some enlightened conservatives among them, and even some unenlightened ones, I daresay.  Most of us are neither one or the other: some of my own views would be considered conservative by some.

[To be continued.]