Turning On, Tuning Out

I used to be a news junkie. The way that an addict can’t wait for their next fix? That was me with news. I con­sumed it as often as I could, I had news sites galore book­marked, RSS’d, and I would con­tin­u­ally be plugged in. I would check the Drudge Report some­times 30 times a day, look­ing for that lit­tle siren that he puts at the top of his page when some­thing is breaking.

If some­one wanted to know what was going on in the world they would ask me because I would know what was hap­pen­ing day after day. I became cocky about it; cor­rect­ing peo­ple about what was going on, because I knew, damnit. If there was a story I knew who the main play­ers were and what they were doing and how they were involved and I could posit sev­eral ways that a story would turn out based on what I knew, and a lot of times I would be right, because there’s only so many ways that a story can end.

But it started to take a toll on me, I started hav­ing panic attacks, I was stressed out a lot, became irri­ta­ble all the time. I had bad dreams, wor­ried all the time about things that might happen.

If Amer­ica goes to war with Iran, what can I do about it? Nothing.

If some­one blows up a nuclear war­head in a major city, do I have any con­trol over it? No.

Gov­ern­ments are run by men, but I am not one of those men. I am an every­day aver­age per­son who just tries to take care of his fam­ily. I give them food and a nice place to live and guid­ance and friend­ship, but Pres­i­dent or Sen­a­tor or even Rep­re­sen­ta­tive is not some­thing I want to be, ever, because those peo­ple know things that I never want to know, things that our gov­ern­ment must do to keep its peo­ple safe. Could I sleep at night, know­ing what Sen­a­tors know, or CIA chiefs? Would I be stressed out all the time? Hell yeah I would be.

And that’s why about 6 months ago I cut the cord. I tuned out. I don’t watch TV news any­more, hardly read about the news on the inter­net, where I am all day long. I unsub­scribed to all of those Google alerts and news RSS feeds and any form of imme­di­ate infor­ma­tion that was out there that I had been plugged into. I stopped lis­ten­ing to radio talk shows and keep­ing up with them. And I am a bet­ter per­son for it.

I know that the influ­en­tial mem­bers of the media feel that the pub­lic doesn’t pay enough atten­tion to what’s going on with the world, but why would they want to? When all we hear about on the news is Iraq and Iran and oil and global warm­ing and how peo­ple are basi­cally rot­ten and life sucks, why would you want to watch the news? All you’re going to do is feel crummy about things you can’t con­trol. The media feels that it’s their job to rally the pub­lic around some­thing, what I don’t know, but they feel that they are advo­cates for some pur­pose (that’s why the got into jour­nal­ism), but they eat that garbage 24 hours a day, they are the junkies I used to be, but the aver­age Amer­i­can doesn’t want that. There are things going on in this world (like Dar­fur) that Amer­i­cans don’t want to know about. We’re all just try­ing to make our lives bet­ter in our com­part­men­tal­ized worlds.

I don’t have panic attacks as often any­more, if I do I flip over to the local clas­si­cal sta­tion. If some­one asks me about a cur­rent event I hardly know what is going on with it any­more. Iraq? No idea. Iran? I have a vague notion. Global warm­ing? Prob­a­bly just a world cli­mate change, and those have been hap­pen­ing for eons. Oil? Some­one will find a replace­ment for it. Rot­ten peo­ple? There have always been rot­ten peo­ple, and the major­ity are gov­ern­ment offi­cials. But what am I going to do about it? I’m going to try to remain happy and take care of my fam­ily. That’s all I’m going to do, and I’m going to stay tuned out and deaf and dumb about the world because it makes me feel better.