Well, it's a little late for last week's Sunday Scribbling, but in the spirit of getting back into blogging I'm gonna do it anyway.
News. The word just doesn't seem to fit what it describes. The word implies newness to me and the news never feels new. I read about politics and murders and disasters and they just seem like the same old stories I've heard a million times before, with the names and dates changed. I guess you couldn't really call the news the "olds" because technically the events chronicled happened recently and also "olds" is not as marketable, doesn't sell papers.
I guess that's why, despite wanting to stay well informed about the world, I often avoid the news. It just feels like listening to example upon example of how we keep making the same mistakes over and over and that nothing really changes. I guess that's comforting for the people who dislike change, but I don't like being reminded of how infrequently the world and the people in it make any significant changes. I want to believe we can change, that we can make change happen, and listening to constant proof of how this is rarely possible in the human race doesn't inspire me to keep trying.
Or perhaps that's my excuse for ditching the newspaper and reading fanfic instead.
News. The word just doesn't seem to fit what it describes. The word implies newness to me and the news never feels new. I read about politics and murders and disasters and they just seem like the same old stories I've heard a million times before, with the names and dates changed. I guess you couldn't really call the news the "olds" because technically the events chronicled happened recently and also "olds" is not as marketable, doesn't sell papers.
I guess that's why, despite wanting to stay well informed about the world, I often avoid the news. It just feels like listening to example upon example of how we keep making the same mistakes over and over and that nothing really changes. I guess that's comforting for the people who dislike change, but I don't like being reminded of how infrequently the world and the people in it make any significant changes. I want to believe we can change, that we can make change happen, and listening to constant proof of how this is rarely possible in the human race doesn't inspire me to keep trying.
Or perhaps that's my excuse for ditching the newspaper and reading fanfic instead.
2 Comments:
I don't usually do this, but my man HDT says it best:
"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea." Walden
H.G.Wells wrote that "reading the newspaper to find out what is going on is like using the second hand of your watch to see what time it is".
But on the bright side of the state of the world, see this excerpt from Stephen Pinker's History of Violence: "In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth."
So, things might be getting better in more than one way, and hey, the music has never been as good or varied, and in general, we are allowed to live our lives in so many ways that weren't possible before. If you ignore that the planet has gone to hell, things are pretty spiff.
Post a Comment
<< Home