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The only rational response to some of the crap that’s going on.
News outlets have been most helpful lately in distilling the day’s news budget into such features as “Five things you should know today in order to appear smarter than your co-workers at the coffee machine.” But this is a trivial ambition. Being able to quote verbatim the latest unhinged sentence fragments from Mad King Donald might give you a temporary sugar high, but what good does it do, really?
We do not need our attention directed to the things that are happening around us, but away from them. We need a filter, a sort of Faraday cage to keep out ENPs — extraneous news pulses. Instead of climbing in a cage, which would work but is not practical, we have to train ourselves in a basic self-defense exercise: clamping both hands over our ears and screaming WA-WA-WA until the would-be informant gives up. (If it’s a written piece, simply turn away and stare at a blank wall until it’s gone.)
Here are your “DON’T GO THERE” news briefs for today:
California Wildfires: No point in contemplating the suffering of a quarter million evacuees, hundreds of whom were burned out last year, or of the hundreds of thousands not threatened by fire but huddling in the dark because the power company can’t stop setting wildfires unless they turn the power off. Nothing to do about the air quality that’s worse than Beijing’s, or the talk that parts of the state — large parts of the state — may be uninhabitable by humans. All together now: WA-WA-WA.
Middle East Oil: Anything having to do with Saudi Syraqiranistan is off limits, because it’s going to blow and gasoline will go to $100 a gallon in about five minutes and why would you want to think about that. Turn 20 degrees to your left. Stare at that wall.
Anything Trump: You hear his name, you spot the fabulous multilayered comb-over, go at once to DefCon Five. Otherwise you’re going to have to process news from an alternative universe, and the side effects are serious. Severe disorientation is the best you can hope for, so don’t listen.
Brexit: If you let yourself get the least bit interested in some aspect of Brexit, say the problem with the Irish border, you will be drawn into the morass like a nice Italian boy into the Mafia, and you will be lost to your family and friends and yourself for the rest of the decade. Brexit is the black hole of news — everything goes in, nothing comes out.
News of any product containing the word “smart.” Hands over ears, quick. If you listen to what they say about smart cars, phones, doorbells or toasters, you will be sucked into a world as phantasmagorical as Trump’s world, only more dangerous, because it is a world of lies, deceptions and false promises about stuff they want you to buy and put in your home, with everything wired to Department of Homeland Security headquarters. Don’t go there.
Work on this list today and we’ll try to get you a new one tomorrow. Once you are proficient at selective ignorance — not to be confused with general ignorance – your life will be more blissful. Shorter, but happier.
“Hear no evil. Speak no evil. See no evil” by smileham is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Even as a kid, it was clear to me that something was rotten in Denmark. But around the turn of the century (2000, or 2001 if one is numerically competent), things began accelerating out of control. Terror events, wars, stolen elections and reelections, superstorms, market crashes, nuclear accidents, et cetera. Now it’s constant turmoil despite the happy consumer existence we’re encouraged to adopts. Don’t worry; be happy. So the entirety of the 21st century has turned into an ongoing circus populated by clowns and criminals. Entertaining? Only in the darkest sense.
Comfortably Numb. Don’t worry, mother (Big Mother/Brother) is going to put all her fears into you…
Don’t we wish sometimes we could be be as blissfully nieve as Forrest Gump gladly spending our day on the lawn tractor?
It’s starting to look mightily attractive.
Typo: State at that wall.
Thanks.
Good list, but missing anything re climate change, presidential impeachment programs or swamp draining projects.
@Tom, what do you think about the veracity of these past few jobs reports? The one that came out today was “surprisingly strong” on account of beating very pessimistic expectations. And then there’s counting second and third jobs as new ones, classifying millions as not in the labor force, etc.
Propaganda.
There’s a Peanuts comic strip in which Charlie Brown asked Lucy if she ever worried about the world coming to an end. She replied, “I try not to think about such things.”
The strip’s story didn’t end at that point, but my point here is that Lucy’s stance seems the one many if not most people take with respect to all the terrible issues confronting us today: climate change, resource depletion, mounting financial crises etc. Add to that all the confusion caused by lies and half-truths from self-proclaimed authorities and the like, and frankly, can you blame anyone for choosing to adopt Lucy’s outlook, as in tucking one’s head in the dirt? What can we do, after all? How many of us are really in a position to do much if anything about the whole mess at all?
That’s frankly why I sometimes (if not often) wonder if I might not have actually been a happier person by simply being ignorant of — and not interested in knowing — the truths underlying all the said issues. Yet now that I know all those things, I can’t choose to ‘unknow’ them anymore.
“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” Seems no wiser words have been spoken.