The soap opera

Guiding Light was a 15-minute radio soap opera in 1937. In 1952, it moved to television as a fifteen-minute show, expanding to thirty-minutes in 1968, becoming a one-hour show on November 7, 1977. Guiding Light aired 57 years until its cancellation in 2009.

A lot of us grew up with Guiding Light. I remember Mother watching it regularly from the early 50s.  We knew the families. The Spauldings and the Chamberlains were prominent.

Kim Zimmer, who played Reva Shayne, was the longest running cast member. She was on the show from 1985 until her final retirement in 2008. Reva was beautiful, naughty and nice, at the center of many of the plots.

On Guiding Light, we got a taste of the wild side. There were illicit marital relationships, stolen identities, embezzlements, out of wedlock children. Revenge out the wazoo. People came back from the dead, only to get killed again. There were corrupt businesses, a lot of grift and deceit. People were in and out of jail. Family squabbles filled the story line. There was much back-stabbing and running around. No one went unscathed.

Guiding Light was an hour of life in another world, one with a dark underbelly, that provided entertainment in its twists and turns of beautiful people, some of whom were on very dark paths. Thankfully, it was only an hour, and we could turn it off before it swallowed us.

The television soap opera had no real-world consequences.

We are living in a soap opera world today. There is no turning it off.  There are real-world, real-life consequences that a lot of us did not sign up for.

The dirty dealing, revenge, and meanness of life 24-7 is sad and wearying. The revenge policy is shocking, and the treatment of immigrants is abhorrent. Taking portraits of Obama and Clinton off the walls of the White House is just plain silly and immature. Joe Biden’s portrait will likely never see the light of day.

The soap opera plot is acted out every day in a gilded Trump world. Many of the Cabinet and other heads of state are made-for-television actors. More than a few are, in fact, television personalities. Hot off the airwaves of FOX and Newsmax. They are talking heads with zero experience in governing, making decisions for the pleasing of Trump and in the hope of getting clicks. They play to every fifteen-minute news cycle.

David Brooks recently wrote an article about how most of the world is more optimistic than Americans are today.  American hope and optimism after WWII stabilized the world and the world economy for the past 75 years. All the problems were not solved, but people felt like we were on an upward trajectory of prosperity and opportunity for all Americans.

Today we live somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and Hunger Games. We are falling down the rabbit hole into an uncertain future.

       Every news cycle brings new drama. Sending National Guard troops to patrol Washington, DC is this week’s show. There is no unrest in DC requiring additional policing. There is, however, a Black Democratic woman who serves as Mayor. Reason enough.

Guiding Light had provocative sexual inuendo. The actors in the Trump soap opera were not play acting. Jeffrey Epstein’s story is dirty business, predatory porn on a grand scale. Young women exploited and abused by powerful men, possibly including the president. If he weren’t in the files, why would he protest seeing them released? Me thinks he doth protest too much!

Every day that the Epstein files are not released, another swipe of bad governance appears to attempt to distract us from the reality that the Epstein drama is bad.

We are finding it hard to change channels on this drama.

What can we do now? We cannot turn off and tune out.

Now is a time for bold braveness. Don’t wait for the other guy to take on the drama. Be the force you want to see. Be the voice you want to hear.

Who are the ones that will be our Guiding Light? We need some heroes in our search for tomorrow. 

Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader, columnist and host of the blogsite www.avirtualchurch.com. She can be contacted at libcam05@gmail.com