My first encounter with social media was probably listening to the car radio as a child while my parents drove around Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. These are some of my earliest memories. A few of the songs I can recall hearing during this time include A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles, Stop In the Name of Love by The Supremes, Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds and Bob Dylan’s incredible nearly six-minute-long hit, Like A Rolling Stone – which sounded revolutionary, even to the ears of a child. This early exposure to legendary radio stations such as KRLA, KHJ, KLOS and KROQ led to my life-long appreciation of music.

A few years later I was in grade school in Riverside, California. At the beginning of class, the first and second-graders would gather in front of the little TV wheeled in on a metal cart by one of the audio-visual techs. Our morning began with two innovative new television shows premiering on KCET – the local PBS station – called Sesame Street and The Electric Company. The two programs ran back-to-back, Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 9:30am, and to this day whenever I hear the voice of Morgan Freeman I think of that show. The cast of Electric Company included Rita Moreno and the aforementioned Mr. Freeman. Sesame Street was just trotting out what are now the old classics like ‘Big Bird’ and ‘The Cookie Monster.’ At the time it was considered highly original, experimental television.

It must be said that at the time we thought it was all pretty stupid. But we were kids – what did we know?

These Public TV programs promoted tolerance and inclusion, and both featured multi-racial casts. This was the first time I had seen such a mix of cultures on TV. The fact that television could be educational was a novel concept in the US at the time. This realization had a huge impact on me because I had always struggled with issues of inclusion when I was growing up. I came from a multi-racial family: my father was a creole – a mulatto – from New Orleans, and I often felt sort of culturally out of place with the other kids.

Seeing the happy interaction of so many cultures on PBS really raised my confidence and influenced the process of ‘individuation’ because I realized it was “cool” to be different. At least it was back in the seventies.

I also felt more comfortable interacting with children from other cultures, because the message was clear from ‘educational programming’ that no matter what race, creed or color they are, people are all essentially the same inside; the divisions and stereotypes created by society are false and arbitrary. This was a revelation for a lot of people.

Being exposed to TV shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company was an empowering example of ‘agency’ in the context of the historical framework. The shows appealed to the viewer’s innate potential as a positive agent of change. They demonstrated to us that we could all make a difference in the world, and that we are important. Sesame Street and The Electric Company promoted unity and acceptance of all people: no wonder the neocons want to shut down PBS!