Hello sexy.
(Source: fuckyeahstudioporn)
This article blows my mind.
This is post from the fantastic blog Raptitude authored by David Cain. It’s a great explanation as to what I’ve been going through for the past, say, five years or so.
On Current Events
I feel like all my life, teachers (especially social studies, government, economics, etc teachers) have been telling my fellow classmates and me to “pay attention to current events, read the newspaper, watch the evening news, blah, blah, blah.” Essentially what this did was create within me the need to feel informed, “on top of things,” and otherwise not-ignorant of what’s going on around me.
So, starting two years ago, I started listening to NPR now and then. Then I started listening to nothing but NPR whenever I had access to a radio. This has snowballed into a full-on addiction to following the news on Twitter from multiple sources, a compulsion to watch every single Daily Show episode the day after it airs on Hulu (I don’t have basic cable) and an obsession with Reddit’s news (the rage-comic addiction is incidental).
Today I hit my breaking point.
I saw actual footage of shooting in Syria that a survivor had shot and posted online. This footage contained an image of a parent carrying their dead child, whose face and head were so brutally mutilated that I wanted to vomit. I can’t get that image out of my mind.
On the news, they’re constantly talking about deaths as numbers. ”12 people were killed in Libya today…” I can’t take it anymore. I can’t think of those numbers in terms other than the number of sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers that were killed, usually for senseless, brutal reasons. These events take place on such a regular basis that it’s hard to see any kind of end to them in the future, and this is just focusing on the really cold-blooded brutal stuff in other countries, without even touching on the class-warfare and economic issues in my own country, the US, or the nuclear disaster and human suffering in the post-earthquake Japan.
Essentially what I’m driving at is I feel I’ve reached a fundamental crossroads between trying to live life happily while remaining ignorant to what’s going on in the world at large, or living life unhappily while keeping up with what’s going horribly with humanity. Which would you choose?
