What About This…? 11.30.2017
I guess it is a function of growing older and having seen a lot of stuff come and go and then come around again that one tends to notice how some things are touted to us by the news we watch or hear. How much of that is “real” news in the sense of being unfamiliar and how much is just the same old stuff with a flurry of changed names or different locations but essentially the same old stuff.
A lot of that stuff is tragedy, so avidly gobbled up by us, and terrible beyond measure for those going through it. But for use watching and listening its the attraction of a slow motion trainwreck and the gratitude that we are not there.
Take those fires in California. It seems like the entire state burned down last year and the year before. And it burned again this year. And will, no doubt, next year. Every time I hear those fire stories the first thing I check is the location. And if its not burning up La Mesa, where my brother lives, its just old news.
And the hurricanes that every year totally trash the homes on the beach. And every year you see or hear that same woman with the dark tan and the bleached blonde hair blowing in the breeze left by the storm promising to “rebuild our home right here on this very spot.”
You’d think there would be something besides the absolutely predictable inclement weather, other natural disasters like fires, earthquakes and the like, that would be reported to us as “news”, but I guess these stories are the fall back positions of news people who are too lazy to go out and find some real news to report, or too cheap to pay for such stories discovered by others.
And don’t even get me started on polls. You remember the polls. The daily, or hourly, or minute-by-minute polls that were so intensely reported, that professed to tell us so truthfully exactly what our fellow citizens were thinking. Those polls that made it seem like voting was merely a formality that would underscore how reliable those polls, and the news organizations that reported them, were.
Maybe I’m just too jaded. Seen too much. Been there, done that, lost the t-shirt I bought. But surely there is more than bad weather, sports, and polls to report.
Isn’t there?
