Participate in the 2009 Media Violence Fast. During the week of October 19, 2009, you can do your part by:
Making a commitment to refrain from watching violence as entertainment during the Media Violence Fast.
Reading the e-mail devotions/meditations that will be sent to you. You may want to use these as a point of discussion with your family, church group or organization.
ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
Violent media surrounds us every day, taking up more and more of our time and attention. While certainly some media that uses violence is high-quality programming using violence to teach a message, it seems that we are all subject to viewing more and more violence every day. Our children will see 100,000 acts of violence on television in the next 10 years. Violence in the media can desensitize people and make violence in real life seem more acceptable.
The So We Might See Coalition’s media violence fast encourages families to take a stand against violent media by making a conscious decision not to watch it — and to seek other methods of entertainment and intellectual stimulation. In addition, each year we select a theme for the fast to provide a topic of meditation and social action. This year we are focusing our justice again to fight anti-immigrant hate speech. At the same time we are avoiding gratuitous violence in our entertainment media, we are going to challenge ourselves to listen to some of the worst anti-immigrant speech and support efforts to increase the public’s access to information about hate speech, thus enabling them to take a stand against it.
Specifically, this year we are supporting the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s efforts to increase the public’s information about hate speech on national media thus enabling American’s to take a stand against hate speech. Please sign our petition to the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Commerce to ask them to conduct an inquiry into hate speech so that we can better understand it, and to update a government report that collects statistics and information about the connection between hate speech and hate crimes.
In this same spirit, we also are encouraging participants to learn more about Islamophobia and to ensure there is less hate directed against Muslim immigrants in our country. Please visit ChangeTheStory.net to read more.
In order to take action, we are encouraging you to listen to some speech that you would not typically want to hear. But unless we do not expose ourselves to the vitriolic speech that appears in the public domain, it will be hard for us to marshal our moral outrage and our action.
Making a commitment to refrain from watching violence as entertainment during the Media Violence Fast. 