Dung Beetles
by Frederick
All the News That’s Fit to Depress
Staying informed has become — for so many of us — a moral obligation that feels like hell.
Courtney E. Martin | December 3, 2007 | web only
…And it’s taking a powerful psychic toll. I’ve heard otherwise politically active people say — more often than I can count — “I can’t handle keeping up with the news these days. It’s just too depressing.” Surely, some of those who aren’t informed are actually psychically protecting themselves. The Pew Center also found that 42 percent of those with a moderate to low interest in international news report avoiding it because there is “too much war/violence” and 51 percent avoid the news because “nothing ever changes.”
I also can’t help but wonder if the average liberal American’s love for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert isn’t a direct result of the emotional relief that comes from being told: “This is the news. Now laugh at it.” The action becomes the laugh. The instinct to torture yourself over how to respond to the situation in Sudan is displaced by a chuckle at how badly other people — namely our eternally comic president — are responding.
I enjoy those shows too, but it’s not enough. We can’t settle for laughing our outrage away when there is so much violence in the world — some of which we are directly responsible for. We also can’t keep shoving the lesson of informed citizenship down good people’s throats — Do your duty! Stay informed! — if we aren’t going to create new ways of responding to all that information. It’s actually a destructive recommendation in many ways — pushing people to grow accustomed to disaster, disconnected, numb, and ethically dumbfounded. At the very least, it’s breaking our hearts.
I keep thinking to myself, “if I didn’t have kids, if i didn’t have bills, if I just had some time and or money.” When does the breaking point come. When do we rise up and follow in the foot steps of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Doctor King? How much of this shit can we, you, I…take?
Comments
Then there are those sad few who think they stay informed with Fox.
Imagine if you will, a very large dirigible, an enormous one at that. Let it represent our society, our culture. You are armed with a pin…a standard ordinary pin. Now one pin prick is completely ineffective against such a monster, but if all of us armed with our pins just keep jabbing away, we’ll fill that motherfucker with millions of holes, rendering it inoperable.
You could even go so far as to say we’re a bunch of pricks.
I keep thinking/hoping we have plumbed the depths and do nothing but rise from here on out. The negative energy is so out of balance with the positive that the stored inertia must be terrific. Something’s gotta give. Unfortunately, I wake up and read the news each day.
Whiny liberal cowards who can’t deal with reality…why am I not surprised? These are the same people who run crying to the Dr for Prozac if they think the French are mad at us.
Pathetic sniviling cowardly traitors. Get the fcuk out of my country!
Apt screen name, Ollie. Your namesake knew something of what being a traitor was all about. Newsflash, this is not your country.
and if only those damn lazy Hollywood commie liberals would stop striking and get back to work! I wants my teevee shows, dammit! /snark
Actually, I’ve been going through major Colbert withdrawals.
This nails how I feel right now. What the fuck do we do?
i have been asking the same question- we are getting dribs and drabs of the truth- because we have been seeking it. now, what are we going to do with it? eventually, the question will become- do we have the courage to do what must be done?