By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I know why people don’t watch the news these days. About five minutes in, overwhelming helplessness can give us brain cramp, heartburn and stomach upset, sending us to the medicine cabinet. Better not to know, we think, hoping to escape the ugliness and tension going on around us, but that never works entirely.
The reflection of the world’s energy can’t be sidestepped any more than weather extremes can be avoided, so it’s best to be forewarned. We’re enormously better off knowing about extremes like the unprecedented ‘frankenstorm,’ Hurricane Sandy, threatening the east coast or the cold front that dropped temps in the Pea Patch this week, thirty degrees in a matter of hours. Besides, we can feel it all coming on, can’t we?
In the good old days when we were limited to a daily paper and the evening news, it was easier to escape much of this angst. Important news came to us quickly enough: I still remember the tension in the air during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the surrealism and and unbearable sorrow of JFK’s assassination, then Martin’s, then Bobby’s. When we had to know something, word got out in no time. Later, “pay TV” brought us hours of advertisement, sprinkled with news bits gone theatrical and increasingly salacious, amping up our stomach acid and giving us reason enough to switch channels. It was easy — and lazy — to assume that the political process would sort itself out in the end. Sadly, we’re living with the price that ignorance of those political realities exacted.