So I checked in on CNN this morning to make sure the world hadn’t blown up while I was catching Zs. Due to their many newsfails, I’m disenchanted with CNN, but if all I want to know is “have we gone to war with anyone else?” or “did the gays reveal their agenda at last and are we now ruled by the fabulous?” I go there. The chances of my falling into something interesting but less earth-shaking are smaller on CNN than say, BBC or Truthout.
Today, though, CNN cheated. They featured news from someone else. Actual, in-depth reporting from people who look like real people and ask actual questions. As they put it:
Editor’s note: The staff at CNN.com has recently been intrigued by the journalism of VICE, an independent media company and Web site based in Brooklyn, New York. VBS.TV is the broadband television network of VICE. The reports, which are produced solely by VICE, reflect a transparent approach to journalism, where viewers are taken along on every step of the reporting process. We believe that this unique reporting approach is worthy of sharing with our CNN.com readers. Viewer discretion advised.
It was…disturbing, to say the least. Here is the report (warning for language–to me that’s the least of it) that pulled me into a bit of research, a look at “The Devil’s Breath” of Colombia. It’s a drug that (aside from side effects that may show up later) does nothing but take away your free will. You are conscious, you are alert–don’t even seem drunk–but you’ll do whatever you’re told. Like the guy who helped his robbers clean out his apartment to bare walls. Scary carp, that.
But it was this, a report on the people living in the sewers of Bogota, that really got me. (Warning for some really…yuck. I mean, if you can’t handle a “stalactite of shit” you’re going to want to watch carefully. And the stories…oh lord, the things people do to people who can’t fight back…)
My writing is not generally dystopian. I brush it somewhat in my SF, and I do like to send my characters into the seedy underside. I mean, Donte lived in a hole in the ground on a world where it’s Snowpocalypse all the time. Taro was a pickpocket and con man before he hit puberty. Eve killed a man in self-defense at eleven, but those situations aren’t my focus. I like to look at the escape from that, or at building a future after that escape, when you don’t know how to live a life that isn’t knee-deep in (figurative) shit.
When I see things like that report, I’m reminded that my characters are very, very lucky. And yes, each had a mentor, someone who plucked them from that hell and changed their lives. It’s a chain, you see. Eve was rescued, so she rescued Donte and Taro. Donte saves Jordan and helps Selene. Taro rescues Keen, who rescues Jadzia, and the two of them rescue Nikolai. I call it Passing It On, after a campfire song I loved as a child. Nowadays people call it Paying It Forward.
I am in love with the Random Capital Letters today, aren’t I?
I’m also reminded that I’ve got to Make It Real. Writing is my talent, my God-given gift, and I believe this is what I’m meant to do with it–to let readers into the lives of people they would never dream they have anything in common with, and show them that in the end, we are all humans, deserving of respect and a chance at our dreams. My goal is to make it Not Matter to anyone that Taro is gay (which seems a bigger sticking point than his criminal past, sadly.) To cast a light on Donte’s fears and find a reflection in the reader. To show that Selene’s life is what it is not because she’s too lazy to make it better, but because she doesn’t actually grasp how. Money and a man to take care of her is all she knows until she discovers she is strong (and holy crap, was that fun to write!)
And I need to do all that while telling a rockin’ good story, because the last damn thing anyone (or at least me) wants when they pick up a book is to be preached at.
Also, I really want to get back to my SF now.