Free Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life by Trevor G Blake Page B

end of the first quarter, no one remained conscious.
    When I moved to America, I wanted to follow the sport. I could not, however, get beyond the number of commercial interruptions that seemed, to me at least, to be thinly disguised military propaganda. I was not judging it. I didn’t have an opinion on the merits of US foreign policy, but I know propaganda when I see it, regardless of who produces it, and I don’t allow it into my brain. I found it hard to tune out the jingoism and enjoythe sport. Hitting the mute button is not sufficient to protect my neurons from all that shock and awe.
    Whether it is an army recruitment advertisement or a military commander involved in the coin toss, all those images can be dangerous to your state of mind. Most people, however, consider them harmless and think of themselves as being immune to the impact because they are seemingly passive background images. If your mentality is unguarded, they are anything but passive.
    Nothing demonstrates the power of media marketing or the extremes of habitual reaction like that of a soldier going off to war. A poorly educated farm laborer, who knows nothing more than the art of tending dairy cattle, watches the threat of terrorism every night on the television news, absorbs the glorification of war in a stream of macho army recruitment commercials during his Sunday football television ritual, and drinks in his favorite reality television show being beamed live from the deck of an aircraft carrier. His reaction is to leave his farm, don a uniform, and travel to a place he could never have found in an atlas. Acting on orders, he shoots an “insurgent” because he believes his freedom on the plains of Ohio is threatened.
    The insurgent was also a happy, world-unwise farm worker, tending goats in his own country. His unguarded state of mentality was convinced by different propaganda that was shouted from a shrine to react to a perceived threat. He left the field that his ancestors had farmed for centuries, strapped an explosive vest to his chest, and went to greet the “infidel” who just showed up.
    As fellow farmers, with individual mindsets and opinions, the two should have had a lot in common. The possibility exists that, under different circumstances and with controlled mentalities, they could become friends, and share their farming stories.
    More than ninety million people tuned into the 2012 Super Bowl half-time show to see a bunch of commercials. Forty-fourpercent of all female and thirty-one percent of all male viewers of the Super Bowl claimed to tune in just to watch the commercials. Most of them probably considered it harmless entertainment and thought they would be immune to its impact. If it were so harmless then why would advertisers be willing to spend $3.5 million for a 30-second commercial? Throughout the game, more than 100 commercials aired. In one advertisement, I counted the word debt mentioned ten times. If that advertisement was played five times during the game, it pressed four-and-a-half billion footprints of debt-thought into the ether, all of which, by the law of nature, must return back into the lives of those who generated them.
    In an average year, a five-year-old sees forty thousand media advertisements. How does that impact a child’s unguarded state of mind? Over a lifetime, how has that impacted adult mentality and eroded individual thought? Statistics show that advertising expenditures for debt reduction programs and weight loss products have grown exponentially in the last few years. At the same time, personal debt is at unprecedented levels and obesity is a national issue. But which came first?
    Metaphors in several popular self-help books compare the mind to a fertile garden. The owner diligently uproots the occasional weed of negativity to replace it with a flower of positivity. New Age xylophones chime in the distance, hummingbirds flutter overhead, and readers everywhere reach for the stomach medicine.
    In