Can You Come Out and Play?

We're building a school of the communication arts. Do you want to come along?

Oh, the questions we'll answer together! The interesting things we'll find! We've built a chapel where we can think big thoughts. And a grand auditorium where we can exchange ideas. The things we'll talk about!

We need only a place to lay our heads when day is over and twilight darkens and campfires dim and talk is done. Will you help us build this place?

The Mainstream Many saw only rickety old windmills and a delusional old man. But Don Quixote saw defiant giants that had to be defeated for the good of the world.

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.

“Those you see there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.”

“Look, your worship,'' said Sancho. “What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the vanes that turn by the wind and make the millstone go.”

“It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that you are not used to this business of adventures.”

– Don Quixote, 1605, by Miguel de Cervantes

I can relate to Don Quixote, can't you? Like him, I often feel that no one else sees the ugly giants that loom so large on my horizon. And like Quixote, I'm often told I'm delusional and irrelevant.

But the giants I see are real.

The Mainstream Many believe that all is well, education isn't broken, journalism hasn't lost its way, music and literature and art were never really important, and traditional advertising is working just fine. “All is well,” the many tell us. But when you look again with the eyes of your heart, you'll see a nation growing dumber, journalism becoming propaganda, art fading into yesterday, and advertising working less and less well.

There are currently 30,299 readers of these Monday Morning Memos who see the same giants I see. And together we're building Wizard Academy, a school of the communication arts. Our goal is to enhance the world's ability to communicate. I'm not talking about inventing new devices to help us reach each other. We already have those. I'm talking about knowing better what to say through this vast megaphone of technology. And how to say it better.

The citizens of the world have been handed cell phones and DVRs, satellite phones and Skype, websites and blogs, email attachments and streaming video and podcasting and Boomerang. We are children with loaded guns. Do you remember when terrorists beheaded an American and streamed his murder onto the internet? Millions of curious voyeurs witnessed it on their computer monitors. How many of those do you suppose were 8 year-olds who will forever carry the itching scab of that wound in their minds? No, don't tell me it was the same as in video games. Even 8 year-olds know that video games aren't real.

He was wearing an orange jump suit.

Can new messages be created to counteract that message? I believe they can. The next 3-day Magical Worlds Communications Workshop is scheduled for Dec. 6-8 at the new, 33-acre campus of Wizard Academy. You really should come and spend time with us.

Maybe we're crazy, tilting at windmills. Maybe we're defeating giants. You decide.

Roy H. Williams