Yesterday, I had the privilege of watching not one, but two, bald eagles practically dance together overhead on my way to the trails, and, beyond feeling awe-struck by their largeness, grace and agility, I was heartened somehow by the sounds of their vocalizations, which were far more gentle and melodic than I’d imagined. Almost as if they were playing an in-flight game of tag, the pair seemed to remain deeply engaged by song, even as they swooped to meet, swirled farther apart, and collaborated to make sure they were making progress together toward what appeared to be a shared destination.

I realize the symbolism of such a scene may be heavy, and probably would mean something a bit different to everyone, but the sight did get me thinking about how essential was each icon’s involvement in their progression – not only in ensuring movement in the right general direction but, it seemed, tending to their relationship along the way. It wasn’t even entirely clear to me that the eagles were getting along perfectly, but their commitment to one another, I felt, looked (and sounded) unquestionably solid; and their example was poignant.

I do still feel that it is in the way our country’s corporate information infrastructure tends so strongly to sideline, to minimize, and to silence that too many people are not only being left – but led – by the wayside at the very moment their contributions are most needed.

I also do recognize the argument that it is only when a president such as Donald Trump is in office that speaking about women’s rights in media is possible, because these are the only times when the media industry is not seen as holding too many important issues hostage to render speaking out defensible. But at what point does the still-enormous concentration of power and influence these organizations hold over the country constitute a sort of permanent presidency in and of itself on which it is, arguably, practically always an acceptable time to comment?

Of course men in charge of media corporations felt insecure at the height of the women’s movement in corporate journalism – a movement that, I believe, illustrated how incompatible such extreme concentrations of power are with human nature, not any sort of inherent defect amongst all men; and it is understandable that they felt compelled to point toward a system of American governance even more harmful than their own – the American confederacy and part of America itself prior to the Civil War – but, it remains worth noting, and even celebrating, that even as the harms of terrible injustices centuries ago continue to be addressed – harms that did constitute what could be termed load-bearing supports, even though I believe there is a strong case to be made they were not foundational, to the new republic – governance via media corporation and governance via the confederacy are not our only two choices. We can return to valuing the idea of a modern constitutional republic not under control of media corporations with all their harms to women and girls; and I still wonder whether simply opening a national dialogue about this possibility could be immensely healing.

Until, under existential threat with the constitutionality of any organization’s ability to issue stock at all without centering the idea of human equality in question, the sector began revamping its image four years ago (Of course it had to enmesh itself with a civil justice movement other than women’s rights in order to survive while avoiding structural reform – a decision I believe corporations like The New York Times and CNN would have taken even if CNN’s current president/the NYT’s former president were American; and this has arguably yielded enormous benefits), how much harm did governance via corporation inflict on the world? And how much does the concentration of power it encourages continue to warp our collective understandings of the world, and of one another? Is it really true, for example, that the country’s only very talented singers just happen to be the ones partnered with massive credit card and telecommunications corporations?

It is the conviction that there always need to be sacrificial groups – not those fighting for the silencing and dehumanization of such groups on behalf of corporate behemoths – with which I take issue.

Today, one of the men I felt was most responsible for my entrapment by the Larry King Live organization is, I believe, in charge of NFL programming; and, as I did back then, I wish I could ask him now to be more sensitive to the rights of women and girls. Then, I remember flying to meet with his boss about how surprised I was by the content she had designed and about trying to get away from the CNN talk show unit altogether but bumping into him when stepping out of an elevator. He told me how glad he was that things were working out the way that they were, and I remember, recognizing his obliviousness, wanting so badly to yell out that I could not believe what the company was doing, that I had felt terribly abused and taken advantage of physically by his colleague/my former fiancé after agreeing to work for the Larry King Live organization, that I did not feel safe, that I missed my old job and home terribly, and that I did not know how to get out of the situation; but even then I had begun to feel that CNN secretly ran on the fossil fuel of gender-based sacrifice, and I felt worried that, after hearing this, he and his team would find a way to remove me from the company and try to erase any evidence my career ever existed at all, and I just looked at him. I thought of this man again recently after seeing a clip of this season’s Superbowl halftime show as I felt it showed in such sharp relief the kind of bargain I still feel too many media corporations are trying to strike with the world – going to extreme lengths to (in an essential and good move) accentuate their support for advances in African American rights while, at the very same time, degrading women openly. But this felt particularly notable to me as, in the lead-up to the show, the NFL had seemed to make such an aggressive effort to encourage young women and girls to tune into their programming.

As the clip I saw was from the rapped portion of the Usher song “Yeah,” I got to thinking about what this was really saying: was it that if a woman failed to conform to the contemporaneous “Slave 4 U” gender role, she would be stranded without transportation? Would she be deserted without a place to live? Would she be denied a career? What if, I wonder, assuming the NFL continues to try to attract young girls as viewers, they would consider another approach and, while I realize this particular duo would probably not make sense to book, featuring content more along the lyrics of the old B.o.B/Taylor Swift song “Both of Us,” which helps underscore that there is not an either/or choice to be made between advances in rights for African Americans and those for women who are not of color – or any group considered preferred prey at any given moment – in media. (As an addendum, I have since watched the whole of this performance and, apart from all the almost overwhelming nostalgia that came with the welcome sounds of so many familiar melodies from years ago, I also felt gratitude it featured the images of several empowered women.)

But, in news, who is there to contact? It certainly does seem to matter, whom one attempts to reach, our communications infrastructure not really being as free or open as it appears. (Prominent figures in media, of course, could allow for equal opportunity to be extended to members of all demographic groups, but that is not the playbook. As gender-based exploitation in media has tended to target women who are not of color, a primary defense against remedying the problem has seemed to be for men in the industry to attempt to suppress solutions proposed during the women’s movement in corporate journalism by disproportionately raising the profiles of women who are of color and claiming this somehow automatically implies universal inclusion.) I still wonder who with any sort of platform today does not benefit so much from the status quo that they may be willing to allow for an open dialogue about corporate media business models. For many years, media corporations have required that women who speak up about gender-based abuse sign nondisclosure agreements in order to have their concerns addressed; but what need have organizations like these of NDAs if the whole modern media establishment has, basically, signed one?

Even though I believe social media corporations may be preferable to broadcast-only media corporations, the former offering citizens both information transmitters and receivers, that almost all of these organizations are traded on the stock market, I believe, still renders the incentives (to grab attention and fall into addictions to emotional triggers rather than helpfully engage, inform and inspire, or be helpfully informed, engaged and inspired) by which they are fueled harmful both to the world and to individuals working within such organizations. In my case, I am grateful for opportunities to learn and contribute professionally that I have had since leaving CNN and I was relieved of course that, I suppose perhaps through some sort of divine intervention, Jordan was not able to render me a single mother during the frightening experience about which I wrote before. But I still wonder whether the listening agency concept I proposed in 2016 as a remedy to the publicly-traded journalism model would be helpful.

It does seem to me regardless that, as important as communication is, there arguably exists a form of interaction that could better be termed anti-communication, which may be even worse than no interaction at all. (If, for example, one were held up and mugged by a perfect stranger at an ATM one day and, later that afternoon, bumps into that very same person in a café only to be met with weather commentary, it would not be as if the comments were necessarily untrue; they may simply be more likely to prevent meaningful connection than to foster it. I think that some would term this “special relating.”)

I believe this is what has made media corporations’ co-optation of the movement for advances in African American rights in the wake of the women’s movement in corporate journalism so difficult to address, because, of course, African Americans’ rights are invaluable and have needed – and continue to need – to be elevated in global consciousness. But that does not make women’s rights any less valuable or the topic of corruption in corporate media unimportant; and it still feels wrong to me that women have seemed to be silenced to the degree that, during the women’s movement in corporate journalism, they offered solutions to the problem of the intersection of the stock market and journalism sectors as a protection for civil rights within such organizations themselves.

Years ago, I believe a corporate news titan famously talked about the importance of understanding his work as navigating, not just a red and blue political continuum, but one out of which, under the jolt of stock market forces, grew a so-called “green” dimension accounting for the profitability of partisan, hyper-sensational and ratings-based, rather than journalism-based, programming; and it is almost unbelievable to me that, even through the women’s movement in journalism, the corporate media industry has been able to prevent a national public dialogue about this problem to this day. While I am still by no means the world’s top expert on “A Course In Miracles,” I find it interesting to consider this in light of what are termed the ego’s “Laws of Chaos,” the first of which being that “the truth is different for everyone.” (I believe it’s a good thing that our country, which was founded on investment in the values of freedom and equality, has political parties to ensure each of these principles is integrated in public policy; but both are arguably undermined by the casino-like force of a stock market-integrated journalism sector that would gamble the nation’s future away.) While I by no means wish to make the case that everyone should be expected to agree on everything, the arguably totally artificial incentive for leading emotion-addicted and passive cable news viewers into starkly different understandings of current affairs greatly exacerbated by the corporate news industry’s intertwinedness with the stock market may be one solvable reason for the gridlock on important issues legislators seem to be encountering. It is arguably just as wrong to pretend all of the problems in the world seem to stem from racism as it is to pretend none of them do, and I believe this is the case so many recent movements, from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party, have been trying to communicate.

Recently, I noted, on a box of “Beyond Meat” sausage a notation that the company has found it important to take a stand for taking meat off the table, and it helped inspire me to consider how, in corporate news, I really don’t know that women and our ideas will ever have a seat at the table before being taken off of it.

What if, I wonder, the journalism sector could go beyond the sacrifice of human beings’ progress, safety and well-being altogether?

Until then, the very corporate executives who have arguably divided the country – not to mention fanned the flames of war abroad – so senselessly over the past several decades will be able to continue to do so by keeping the musical chairs, so to speak, of demographic scapegoating moving – not making room for everyone, but continuing to do whatever they want through whichever demographic proxies their narratives have cast as heroes at the moment.

The coal mining light company executives in Gertrude Saves Her World kidnap intelligent lightning bugs to fill new lamps, and, in a way, this is a step forward for them. But they do not stop their former work and, to take the analogy of modern media corporations further, I still wonder why, in addressing their operations, we have stopped short of critiquing the practice of establishing dominance over the world by mining it for insecurity, fear, and anger – listening, finally, to some of the proverbial canaries harmed in the process – but not questioning the paradigm itself. Systematic sacrifice on the basis of gender and race for the purpose of delaying the improvement of outmoded systems is a long-standing practice, and, yes, of course, we should establish protections for canaries of all kinds. My hope is simply to ask whether we should be mining at all.

They say that with privilege comes responsibility; and I believe that having been born in the United States is a massive privilege some may believe to be a calling in and of itself. It just continues to feel to me as though the question of the moment is whether or not we are willing to come together to answer it.