I always pay attention to what is pushing on my consciousness / catching my attention.
And lately, every time I look at the web or at a newspaper or listen to WVXU – I see / hear a story about someone who tried to do a repair at home or on their car – and how much it ended up costing them to fix the problem they caused themselves.
The message, clearly, is that we should take stuff to get fixed, and let the experts do it.
Way too many of these stories to be just a coincidence. Either Spirit has seeded these stories around (which I don’t believe, since those sorts of seeds create empowerment and advancement), or clever marketing folk have picked up a way to get an advertisement without advertising.
Which is easy for me to believe these days. Used to be when those of us in touch with the media would send out a press release, the reporter would call and ask questions, or run the story their own way, or add in other information. A press release never got printed verbatim, or anything close to it.
Nowadays, it’s a very different story. Many of the stories you read, even those with a byline, are actually just press releases, written by people / organizations pushing their own points of view. Newsrooms are so decimated – and getting more so – and the loss of advertising revenue often means a bigger newshole in the publication – that more stories are needed, not less – with way fewer folk to look for and then write them.
So don’t pay attention to the noise that says we can’t fix things ourselves. Maybe a given repair needs an expert, maybe not. Check it out for yourself. Just don’t pay attention to the message being shouted out by the members of the ruling paradigm.