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VIEWPOINT
"Exploring The Powerful Issues & Emotions of The Middle East"
Reaching out to 51,228 Viewpoint readers around the globe
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Editor's Note:
We have a special issue for you today, written by the CEO
of Gophercentral. It is a thought that goes with the New
Year. We all make resolutions, but how many do we keep?
Our CEO, JA was asked to write a preface for the book,
Put God First.
He obtained permission to reprint and share it with you.
We have no financial interest in the book except its
spiritual importance.
If you wish to purchase the book, a URL has been provided.
Happy New Year from the Gophercentral staff
URL to purchase: Put God First
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Preface to Put God First
I was first introduced to Jeff Einstein about four years
ago through his weblog on media and addiction, Einstein's
Corner. I was immediately hooked on his viewpoint, and
found it so intriguing that I sent him an email telling
him that his insight was fresh and brilliant.
Jeff emailed me back and expressed his gratitude, and I'm
happy to say that our first email exchange has since
evolved into a special friendship. I think it's fair to
say that we hit it off right away...
So when he told me that he was writing a book titled Put
God First, I was instantly fascinated, and he indulged me
by sending the first draft as soon as it was ready. In my
opinion, Put God First nails THE PROBLEM of the 21st
century: We have taken a flight from faith and are wander-
ing in the proverbial spiritual desert as we feed our
media addiction.
In recent years we seem to have moved well beyond the
couch potato syndrome that defined our relationship with
television and mass media through the mid-1990s. Our media
choices have increased exponentially in the past decade,
and today we might be better characterized as benumbed,
spiritless spuds.
Burt Lancaster, in the 1960 award-winning film Elmer
Gantry, warned against the compartmentalization of
spirituality when he said, "You can't go to mass on
Sunday and cheat in business on Monday."
In today's media-saturated environment, what Jeff refers to
as the Great Age of Excess, we consign God and spirituality
to ever-smaller and smaller compartments. Most of us no
longer give the Lord a single day a week, or even a few
minutes a day. Our faith continues to shrink as our media
addiction continues to grow.
And as our faith decreases, our fears increase.
Fear is the soul-destroying weapon that the media wield to
cleave God from our lives. Thus, watching the news is no
longer about information that we can use. It has instead
become a high-speed conduit for instilling and fostering
fear. Terrorism, bird flu, economic collapse, global warm-
ing, illegal immigration, killer storms; the list goes on
and on.
The main message, however, is always the same: Be afraid.
Be very very afraid. Fortunately, however, the same media
that advise us to fear everything also offer up a ready
antidote with each and every warning: more media. "Stay
tuned," they tell us.
In the Great Age of Excess fear has replaced faith. So what
can we do? Jeff's call to Put God First echoes the gentle
and emarkable response of Ann Frank, a little girl whose
generous spirit and great heart belied the sheer terror
that held her and her world hostage in a terrible time:
"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy
is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone
with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does
one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes
to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature."
Unlike the fear and tyranny suffered by Ann Frank and
millions of others during World War II, however, many of
the fears and tyrannies that confront us today are self-
induced and manufactured. Thus, in the titanic struggle
with our own excess there are few easy villains in the
traditional sense, in large part because – as Jeff suggests
– we are very much complicit in our own addictions.
For instance, while today's media landscape features
legitimate global media cartels that function at times not
unlike the illegitimate drug cartels of Colombia, it also
– with the sudden and relentless onslaught of consumer-
generated content – features millions upon millions of
small neighborhood dealers, each with their own designer
drugs to produce and sell.
Regardless of who produces and supplies the narcotic,
however, the demand will continue to increase in
proportion to the promise of a functionally limitless
supply guaranteed by functionally limitless bandwidth.
And as the supply and demand for more media escalate, so
too do the dangers: Inertia and apathy, two of addiction's
primary byproducts, flourish in the Great Age of Excess.
Inertia is what makes addiction so difficult to bust, and
apathy is what besets us when we repeatedly encounter the
depths of our own inertia. Apathy then breeds apathy. As
we multitask across a typical universe of HDTVs, laptops,
wireless phones, PDAs and MP3 players, we think little and
care even less about the people and things that aren't on
the screens directly in front of us.
We simply haven't the time to consider whatever isn't on
the screen in front of us right now. So we visit less with
friends and family, we volunteer less, we pray less and we
sleep less, all so we can spend more time consuming media.
In the end we find ourselves connected to people all over
the world but disconnected from the people living in the
same house and town. And the most notable estrangement,
of course, is from God Almighty Himself.
As the amounts of time and money that we devote to our
media addiction grow, time and money for all other relation-
ships is compromised. Not only is our relationship with
God short-changed in the process, but all of the other
important relationships we need for healthy lifestyles and
souls are imperiled as well:
Our relationships with our children, our spouses, our
friends, and our businesses are all offered up on the altar
of our addiction to the media. How often have you heard or
uttered the words, "I'm sorry, but I've been so busy..."
in the past month alone?
Of course we're all busy; we always have been, always are,
and always will be. But nowadays we seem to have even less
time than ever for the important relationships in our
lives, especially our relationship with God. We find our-
selves falling farther and farther behind in our lives
simply because we spend so much of our precious time
feeding our addiction to media each and every day.
We are compelled to feed the beast, and we find that the
beast–like all addictions – is insatiable.
Put God First is an important book. It shows us how to
reintroduce God into our lives as a critical force for
moderation in the Great Age of Excess. It shows us how
a return to faith translates into a return to reason.
Although each chapter begins with a brief prayer, Put
God First is by no means a preachy evangelical treatise.
Nor is it a convenient and self-serving exercise in media
bashing. No matter what your religion or your relationship
to media, you'll find something of value – something
immediately applicable to your life – in these pages. Jeff
has written a book that speaks with wisdom and compassion
to the 21st-century malady of maladies.
Hopefully, by shining a light on the problem we will then
be better equipped to develop solutions. Time, however, is
of the essence. Put God First shows us how and where to get
started...
Jaffer Ali (AKA JA)
CEO of NextEra Media, GopherCentral, Evtv1.com & Media
Addict
URL to purchase your copy of Put God First
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