The end of the Don Imus Show is the latest in a continuing saga of events generated by our continuously morphing society. What did Imus do? He went where numerous other shock hosts have gone before him, but society reacted more profoundly this time as we continue our collective struggle to define our emerging consciousness.

Collectively, we are clearly approaching a major paradigm shift internationally that has been fashioned by the enormous technological advances that our world has been experiencing during the previous decade. Predicated upon the fact that we are now totally and completely tied to each other world wide for the first time in history, this transformation has resulted in the broadest societal change that the Earth has ever faced.

We are hooked up on multiple levels. From the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, from the Arctic to Siberia, our fellow human beings have wireless communication devices that provide contact capacity where it had never existed before.

We now have the ability to commune through the Internet, through cell phones, through Treos and Blackberries with almost anyone anywhere in the world. When teenage kids join each other in chat rooms across continents, nothing goes unchallenged. Regardless if it is the misstatement from leaders, from clergy or from a shock jock, they now have the ability to confirm, verify and validate immediately and completely by tapping some keys or simply calling each other. This quantity of massive change has resulted in anger, fear and a certain amount of chaos as we struggle to define new pathways in our culture because this connectedness creates new truths and new accountability.

What Imus did, either intentionally or unintentionally, was demean a portion of our society, and, even though it previously cost us half a million lives to determine the actual definition of a human being during the Civil War, and in spite of the fact that Women’s Suffrage is long over, our civilization seems to finally be emerging in a positive manner in that it is no longer interested in supporting hurtful comments that degrade or humiliate our brothers and sisters.

The rules are changing. Don selected the wrong string of words from an old belief system that, even in jest, has now cost him his $10M a year salary. It is clear that many of us do not want to continue to support a philosophy of meanness. It seems that our civilization is in the long process of learning to be kind, and it is the duty and responsibility of our leaders and icons to be honest brokers of the truth. For that miscalculation it was determined that Imus has failed, and now we will move on to determine what our new societal standards will become.

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