Crying Over The News
I had a strange experience yesterday. I started crying at the news. Now, this is a strange experience for me. Normally I don’t even watch the news. I get most of my news from the internet. I will admit to a bit of an addiction to NPR, but that is due to the commentary (and the sound of human voices, since I live alone). But yesterday I was babysitting for a friend, and while her toddler was taking a nap I turned the TV on. Truth be told, I didn’t feel much like doing anything else –chasing after a toddler is exhausting! Anyhow, I turned it to CNN just to see what they were talking about. After awhile they did this story on the economy and the effects of the housing crisis, etc. First there were all these pictures and discussions of the growing numbers of pets abandoned as desperate owners lose everything. Then they started talking about the food pantry problems and showed a picture of a food pantry whose shelves were almost empty.
It was too much. I lost it. Sitting on my friend’s couch, I burst into tears. Why I don’t know. Perhaps because I know that was the tip of the iceberg; that is so much worse than that. And that it will get far, far worse before things get better. Perhaps it was just seeing an actual face to the problems I understand intellectually. There is an incredibly large gulf between understanding something in the abstract, and understanding it in the human context, down deep in the gut where it hurts.
Or maybe I’m just too soft-hearted.
posted by RAS at 8:23 AM
1 Comments:
Hi Ras. Sorry that your TV-news experience was so downtrodden. Some of the news gets me sad or mad, depending....but I try to pull back and learn facts rather than plugging into an isolated segment. I also remind myself that part of the news agenda is to 'sell', so they slant stories for sensationalism. That's not to discout where our Nation is, economically, but sometimes it helps to do some research outside of what the news stations report.
I believe, like many economists are now admitting, that we have been in a recession. If you check the true facts that feed into creating our GDP, you can see how the Feds manipulate some of the components that make up the GDP -- just to suit their own agenda.
American life is going to get much worse -- brace yourself. The one benefit of ALL of this, though, is that more and more Americans have seen-the-light. More of us have grown distrustful of our Government and political leaders. Many of us see little more than incompetence. Count yourself fortunate to be one of those who has become enlightened. Count yourself as one who realized that any personal dependency is certainly not advantageous.
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