Gray Matters: “Probing The Depths of the In-Between”
“Probing the depths of the in between”
in-be·tween
ˌinbəˈˌtwēn/
informal
adjective
adjective: in-between; adjective: inbetween
Situated somewhere between two extremes or recognized categories; intermediate.
“I am not unconscious, but in some in-between state”
When I first started to tell people a few years ago that I was interested in shifting out of private practice and more into radio/media, more specifically political/social talk radio, the general response that I got “Why in the f&$k would you do that? Now that I am sitting here writing this maybe there is something wrong with me? But that is the problem with society right now. That anyone who is attempting to change things looks at the resistance that it will cause and questions whether or not it is really worth it. I tried to do that for so long but apparently I am not very good at it.
As a counselor in private practice, I often thought of myself as a field medic of sorts; treating the collateral damage that society has inflicted upon adolescents and young adults. My job merely to put them back together and send them back out to battle with a thicker Kevlar vest, hoping that it would insulate them from the world that they live in. My job is to help people cope better with things in life but what do you do as a professional when you see that the things causing the problems in the first place are getting worse and no one seems to be doing anything about it?
Being a counselor, I have the privilege of being let into so many people’s lives across every single major demographics. People will open up to me about things that they often won’t tell their own family or let me in on things happening at home, work, neighborhood, church, etc. that they would never want people to know about. That is perhaps why the past several years have really disturbed me as a parent and an American. Regardless of people’s political viewpoints, I have seen the collateral damage that our current political climate has caused on people. Literally, people are turning their backs on family members, stopped talking to friends they have known for years, people getting into such heated arguments they have broken their hand punching a wall. The scary thing is that is what I see from my clients who are mentally stable. The ones who walk a fine line between emotional stability and thought disturbances are taking the extreme things they see on the internet and truly believing that things are so bad that they have to do something about it.
We aren’t talking about terrorists here, we are talking about American’s being turned on each other and looked upon as the enemy. Politicians have been playing the division games for decades with each election taking us one step further each time. The media plays into it for ratings, politicians play into it for votes, corporations play into it for profits. Like a frog in a pot of boiling water, they have taken it too far and we are starting to see the collateral damage of these Machiavellian tactics. They say “the ends justify the means” but what if the means are causing our children to dive into drugs, sex, video games, etc. because of their hopelessness with the society they are supposed to inherit? You don’t have to believe me but what I say is the truth…I am the canary in the coal mine and it is time for people who want to listen to hear me squawk.
The mission of Gray Matters is to disrupt these divisive tactics of politicians and the complicit media personalities. We set out to be a place where we can leave our political pre-conceptions at the door and instead operate in the gray where life really exists. Life doesn’t have any red or blue solutions but rather shades of gray. We have been made to think that this doesn’t exists but it does and we are not going to let them get away with telling us that it doesn’t. We explore the political and social world as Americans trying to understand this complicated world and to use that understanding to come up with solutions that serve not one group but Americans as a whole. This show is about modeling how we can communicate and meet in the middle again, how to humanize each other, how to come together and realize that we are all in the same boat. This is not a war for your minds as Alex Jones puts it, it’s rather them making you think it is a war to begin with. Put your weapons down, put your walls down,, take your shoes off, grab a cold beverage, and join us in the gray.
