The Media Was The Message



The Media Was the Message ©
Gary Shulman, MS. Ed.
July 25, 2023

The images fed to our vulnerable brains
Plant seeds that are rapidly sown
And so it was done back in the day
Seeds planted I try not to own

As a child watching “I Love Lucy”
And of course there was “Father Knows Best”
Let’s not forget “Leave it to Beaver”
They were TV at its very best

But subterfuge is a tricky thing
It creeps, it crawls, it sneaks
Into the depths of your psyche
A potent message it loudly speaks

The images the powers presented
Represented a mighty few
They taught a lesson to children
Often saying you couldn’t just be you

I truly never saw myself
That might also ring true for you
They were careful to represent an image
And that image for me was not true

This world of ours is diverse and hued
In colors, genders, religions and more
That weren’t always presented back then
The subliminal message you could not ignore

You were told who belonged and who did not
You were taught about expectations
A pseudo-perfection of life was seen
Lessons with powerful reverberations

Some of us were lucky in life
An epiphany we were able to discover
We all have a right to be seen in life
From that subterfuge we were able to recover

I have worth in just being me
As you have in being you
We all have a right to be represented in life
Now let’s always make sure that is true

About this poem

The lessons we learned from old TV shows sometimes did not reflect our reality

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Written on July 25, 2023

Submitted by shulman.gary on July 25, 2023

1:20 min read
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Quick analysis:

Scheme AXX XBXB CDED XFCF XGXG XGAG XHXH XIXI JEJE CGJG
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,378
Words 269
Stanzas 10
Stanza Lengths 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

Gary Shulman, MS. Ed.

Gary Shulman, MS. Ed. has spent a lifetime supporting vulnerable families and children. He began his career working with children with and without disabilities in an inclusive Head Start program in Brooklyn NY. He then transitioned to become the Special Needs and Early Childhood Coordinator for the Brooklyn Children's Museum for 10 years. His passion for advocacy grew as he worked more and more with parents of children with disabilities. For over 24 years he passionately advocated for the needs of these parents as the Social Services and Training Director for Resources for Children with Special Needs, Inc. in NYC. The last 8 years of his working life, Mr. Shulman served as a private Special Needs Consultant conducting hundreds of training sessions throughout NYC and beyond to help parents and professionals find and access the services and systems required to facilitate maximizing the potential of their children with disabilities. Now Mr. Shulman is happily retired in Palm Springs CA, but still volunteers his time any way he can to provide information to those in need of his expertise. Today, Gary enjoys sharing his poetry that he passionately writes with the goal of leaving this world a better place one word at a time. more…

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