Forgiveness for the Uninformed, Rage Against the News Machine / 2-6-12

Not forgiveness for the "Uniformed." That would be a very condescending post.

I kid, because defensive mechanism. In all honesty, I'm not sure what the point of this little essay is, yet. I'm going to start with a list, follow it with between one and a dozen observations, leading to a semblance of a point, perhaps gracing it all with a counterpoint, if you're lucky. I plan to offer a conclusiony item near the endy part.

(Not sure how it's all going to turn out. This is just how they teach you to operate in school. Begin to write, then think.)

Pre-thinking stage: engage.

a) Israel is thinking of starting a little war with Iran.

b) A riot killed 79 people in Egypt last week, and injured hundreds. The aftershock riot, a couple days later, killed 10 more.

c) Syria continues to knock off its citizens, day by day. Russia and China are vetoing any U.N. action.

d) Oh yeah, speaking of Russia, as hundreds of its citizens continue to die of cold, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in protest and support for apparent King Vladimir Putin.

e) The Republicans are choosing a presidential candidate, one state at a time. One guy seems to have taken charge, but it's been a pretty topsy-turvy ride so far.

f) Facebook is readying for what could be the largest IPO of all time. Hell, throw moderation out the window. This WILL be the largest one of all time.

g) Unemployment is dipping quickly.

h) Same-sex marriage is being considered/approved in three more states (WA, NJ, MN).

i) A Super Bowl was played yesterday. A good one, too. Record viewership for the game and the halftime show.

j) Outrage at the Susan B. Komen For the Cure's plan to defund Planned Parenthood caused the board to reverse its decision.

k) Citizens United is now two years old. The court case that paved the way for unlimited (unlimited!) donations from a single entity to a political campaign. It's being challenged everywhere, because most people are against bribery. (Unlimited donations! Pause for a second and think that one over.)

Those are just the top stories I can recite off the top of my head. A bit of shallow research reveals that a few other significant things are also ongoing.

l) Russian scientists are about to finish drilling through two miles of Antarctic ice and reach a pressurized underground lake that has not been explored for 100 million years. What's that again about the Mayan prophecy?

m) More European countries' debt ratings are in danger of being downgraded as they begin to deal with the consequences of unfunded spending programs. Like France and stuff. Big financial problems ahead, probably, with worldwide ramifications.

n) Fidel Castro was seen in public, touting a memoir. Remember him?

o) Hey, guess what: this little thing called "Occupy" is still happening, with peaceful protesters being mistreated by police every day, First Amendment be damned.

Thinking stage: engage.

First pointlet, then is that all that stuff listed above happened or continued to happen last week. How can a person possibly stay informed? Reading enough on each of these topics, just enough to rise above mal-informed to semi-informed, would take a person's entire trove of free time. No matter how much that person had! 168 hours might be sufficient, on a weekly basis, provided the person were a very fast reader. And possessed a time machine.

One could read headlines only. I have lots of days when that's all I can do. The experience is very unsatisfying, like a daily diet composed of fourteen snacks instead of three and a half meals.

I didn't even include any of the gossip "news" that bubbles at the surface -- Justin Bieber this, Kim Kardashian that, Brad Pitt this, MIA that. Best leave those "stories" to the professionals.

No sense in trying to stay up on the local stuff, either. Sticking strictly with national and international stories above, and just the big ones at that. Property taxes going up or serial killer strikes again in your town? You could hardly know that, unless it was your job to know so many things. So very many things.

That's why, today, pointlet two: I'm asking for and granting forgiveness to all uninformed parties everywhere. I am extending, right now, a blanket -- nay, a veritable quilt of mercy to all planetary inhabitants. You didn't know the city of Berkeley voted to pull out $300 million in assets from a large bank, so it could place the money in a more socially conscious place? Peace be with you. You didn't catch the headlines about the quake in the Philippines? Shalom anyway, Allahu Akbar and all that jazz. You holding on to something earth-shattering I didn't know about? I humbly beg your forgiveness.

There's too much information. It's too easy to disseminate. It's getting harder and harder to sort through it all, let alone keep up with a story for more than a day or two.

I'm not sure how this will turn out, still, but it appears a major point has stumbled into this post: We, as a nation, are bombarded with news. We've become are too adept at reporting stories. I submit that we have left the land of diminishing returns, news-wise, and have bravely set foot on a new patch of terra firma, where the amount of information available now places too much power in the hands of the aggregators and the opinion makers.

An amateur news-gatherer, or a semi-interested news reader, who has literally millions of informative blogs to choose from, is ironically more at the mercy now of news aggregators than ever before.

I can't stress enough how ironic the situation has become. There are hundreds of major news outlets slanted this way or that, and hundreds more trying so very hard to be unslanted. Old media and new media have merged -- you tell me how we should tell them apart. How do you find enough to make up your mind on any issue of importance? How do you find a reliable source, who will give you facts and analysis you can trust, and I don't mean based on ideology, but on sound thought processes and verifiable events?

For so very many of us, you don't. You stop by Daily Kos and the Huffington Post on your lunch hour if you're a liberal, catch some Rush Limbaugh on talk radio in the car and log on at redstate for a few minutes in the evening if you're a conservative. Why? Because you're not going to spend half your day researching a major issue or story, unless it's your job.

The junkiest of new junkies among us will always devour enough material to satisfy their appetites, and if they do it right, they'll turn that information into knowledge. The rest of us? Good freakin luck.

I don't think the current state of news presentation is healthy for our republic. But I also don't have a solution. Feel free to suggest one.

You Probably Won't Even Remember This Headline / 3-16-11

I'm not a history scholar by any means.

But it sure seems to this untrained observer that world events move at a different pace now.

In 1989-1991, an entire empire (one built on the quicksand of totalitarianism disguised as communism) disappeared from the face of the earth, just like that. My senior year in high school, a whole quarter of our social studies course was to be dedicated to studying the U.S.S.R.; it was naturally meant to fall under the rubric of geography. Yeah. That ended up being a history lesson instead.

We marveled at the breakneck speed of revolution. Boy, were we ever young.

(And before I go on, hell yes, those were awesome times to be a teenager! The world was on fire. [Hey! Billy Joel is NOT playing in the background. You're not hearing that song. You're really not. You might be hearing this one, however.] Relatively bloodless revolutions toppled regime after regime in Eastern Europe. Borders opened, walls fell, and a speedy war in Kuwait placed America so very squarely on top of the international food chain. Outside the food chain, even. For a decade.)

And to think, at the time, we didn't even have cell phones, the Internet, digital cameras, music downloading, DVD's... those things spent the 90's becoming ubiquitous.

So instead of experiencing another round of political upheaval, we held on the rest of that decade for dear virtual life as technological advances raced ahead with maniacal all-obsoleting speed. CD's used to mean something. Cordless phones used to mean something. 1 megapixel used to mean something. Digital cameras used to mean something. Huh. 128 megs of RAM was once considered ostentatious.

But you were there. You know all this.

What does it mean?

It means we're living in an uncertain era of change, and sometimes we don't even know what brand of change is lurking around the calendar's corner. Unhyperbolically, we're passengers in an era of hyper-accelerated cause and effect. Facebook and Twitter and other platforms have brought the reality of constant motion and constant contact to every doorstep, or to every doorstep's neighbor. You can be unconnected, but it takes an advanced degree in Hermitology and a will of titanium. Or a trip to the inner reaches of, say, Congo. (In a pinch, a week of watching Fox "News" will fill you with enough untruths that your connection becomes spotty.)

Everything is everywhere -- even in Congo, truth be told -- if only we want it. Sometimes when we don't want it, hm. The next thing is always about to happen; the last object in your rear view mirror is way, way, way farther than it appears.

Sudan voted to split into two nations way back in January. Remember? More than 100 people died in a bombing in Moscow a couple weeks later. Anyone recall the New Zealand earthquake that killed 200 people? Yeah, me neither. That was all the way back in February. Three weeks ago already.

Who was the president of Egypt from October 1981 until last month? Can't think back that far. That was one 9.0 quake, one tsunami, two near-government shutdowns, one bloody civil war, five major civil unrests, one oil spike, four nuclear explosions, one stock market hiccup and one Charlie Sheen ago. (Come to think of it, Charlie's kind of old news.)

I'd like to offer three conclusions from the observations above:

1. No longer does the phrase "We've always done it this way" carry any weight. For better or worse, traditions are measured in weeks and months, maybe years, but certainly not decades or longer. One-day-old news is exactly that. No, not news -- one day OLD.

2. People resistant to change are going to have a very, very, very hard time the rest of this century.

3. September 11, 2001 will be 10 years old when we go back to school after summer vacation. It might as well have happened a thousand years ago.

Madison, Egypt / 2-21-11

Tunisia and Egypt threw off their Dictator-Presidents earlier this month. Hundreds of protesters perished last weekend in Libya; the carnage there continues today.

Why?

It's simple. They've been oppressed for decades. Centuries.

All they want is some freedom. Self-governance. Civil liberties. Economic freedoms. More guaranteed rights. Just like the ones a lot of other humans enjoy. Freedom engenders a righteous envy.

Most basically, they want more flavors of liberty.

It makes perfect sense: Freedom is delicious. Far from blaming Tunisians, Egyptians and now Libyans for causing trouble, we admire their efforts and wish them success.

Meanwhile, nobody has died in Wisconsin (U.S.A.) during the week of protests against Governor Scott Walker's plan to remove certain collective bargaining rights from nurses, firefighters, teachers and cops.

And Mr. Walker has only been in office eight weeks. He's not yet eligible for dictator status anyway.

Plus, he's not proposing to suspend religious freedom. Or curtail free speech. Or revoke the Second Amendment. He's just trying to break unions.

But this is where comfort might come from tonight: Human beings a continent and a half away are selflessly shedding their own blood, in pursuit of more rights. And thankfully, respecting their sacrifice, enough of us in this freest of nations continue to resist those who would nudge us (even if only a little) back toward the ugly place from which so many North Africans are trying to flee.

Carry on, Wisconsin protesters. And any lovers of liberty worldwide, you too.

144 Or less, Vol. VIII / 2-18-11

Something Baby Bush DID get right:

"The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.

Granted, he got himself some speechwritin' help there, as is usually the case with presidents (but only usually), yet the point remains: Freedom gonna do its thing.

Totalitarian regimes tremble today across the Middle East (Tunisia, Egypt, maybe Bahrain, then Iran?). Made me recall the run-up to III (Illegitimate Invasion: Iraq), when conservative apologists continually insisted that a free Iraq would set off a neo-domino theory in which long-awaited civil and economic liberties sweep the region.

They were probably right. Doubtful our military "assistance" was needed, but still.

To conclude, more W: "This young century will be liberty's century."

Hoping.

(Word count: 142)