By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Fires and floods and wars, oh my. We live in anxious times. ‘News’ agencies that embellish their delivery with talking heads and looped commentary do little to inform us, and next to nothing to sooth us. If we dare agree this is infotainment, not news, it can rightly be categorized as a “horror” format these days, delivering dread, dismay and nasty shocks with a smile and a wink. Yes, fires and floods and murders and frauds and don’t-expect-help-anytime-soon, political gridlock, oh my.
Watching clips of the raging waters in Colorado and the Seaside Park inferno in New Jersey I was reminded how immediate life has become these days. I doubt that those caught in the adrenal overload of flood or fire today care what’s going on in the Middle East or even about the stonewall in a belligerent Congress (at least until it votes on withholding FEMA funding or shuts down government, as it threatens to do next week.) The reality of those caught in emergency is very personal, and their future, if viewed through the lens of similar disasters we’ve been tracking for over a decade, consists of one long slog through the red-tape of insurance carriers, disaster relief and political SNAFU.
Thanks to our computers and 24/7 cable channels, we can live their heartbreak in every painful detail even as it occurs. Thank you, intertubes, you have changed our lives forever. The good old days of “film in the can” on its way to our newspapers and newscasters for tomorrow’s headlines appear as antiquated as oil lamps and corsets. Only time will tell if supercharging our ability to know what’s going on in the world has been for the better. What we know for sure is that it’s certainly been hell on our collective nervous system.