The Things That Should Matter
I’m so sick and tired of celebrity headlines dominating the news. The news used to actually report newsworthy items and not concern themselves with catering to the lowest common denominator. That task was left to the general entertainment of television shows and made for TV movies.
In the past six to ten years, there has been a massive shift to catering to garbage. This is most likely due to the news organizations realizing that people like stupid humor and train wreck celebrities so, they started ignoring real news and went to what brought instant ratings and huge advertising dollars.
I’m not going to disparage people like Britney Spears, nor am I going to make fun of the circus of Anna Nicole Smith. Britney Spears is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is completely out of control, and has no idea how to function in the real world. Instead of focusing on that and how to help her and other people, the news just makes fun of her. Her “friends” do nothing to actually help her and, in fact, are encouraging her behavior because it makes for a good sound bite.
Anna Nicole Smith led a semi-tragic life. The Economist wrote a very good obituary about her life. Instead of having some dignity in her death, we are bombarded daily with a circus that includes, a joke of a judge, people fighting over her body, people fighting over her DNA, and people fighting over her daughter. Even in death, she hasn’t quite achieved that celebrity status that she so yearned for while she was alive.
So, what’s the point of all this? Why bother if I don’t care one bit about it? I agree that you should report the death of a semi-celebrity, but move on. There are far more important, and tragic, things happening in the world. Stop reporting and giving attention to low quality news that, quite frankly, are not what we, as a society, should be concerning ourselves with.
The media, however, is complicit in this as well. Take, for example, the NBA all-star game. The media are reporting it as a huge success and great fun. The major media that covered the event are mostly ignoring the hundreds of arrests and the general thuggery that the league has turned into. The NBA chooses to claim that the all-star game was a success and everything is great because they are all too happy to take the money and run. Their pathetic attempts to reform the league by making players wear suits have done nothing to improve their image. They have, apparently, decided that it’s best to just ignore the problems and write that the NBA is great and everyone is happy.
Most of the “war on terror” has been ignored or spun so badly that no one cares. Americans are more interested in who Simon Cowell is going to make fun of on American Idol than what’s going on in Afghanistan. Hell, most of them probably can’t even find Afghanistan on a map.
This is partly because this is what is marketed to Americans and partly due to the deterioration of critical thinking skills in the education system. We are now starting on a second generation of people who cannot think for themselves. They are fed a steady diet of toilet humor, contests to make instant riches and propaganda that puts a current political position in a favorable light.
People like me are in the minority. If we begin shouting, we are quickly silenced by the drones who can shout louder. Majority rules. No one wants to hear about how horrible things really are in Iraq. No one wants to learn about other countries because, well, it’s too hard. No one wants to believe that America is no longer the greatest nation on Earth, a title I’m not sure we ever really held.
Surfing online finds that several of the major, social networking sites are more concerned with the “most awesome picture ever” and “look at this, it’s making fun of religion, again.” Substantive articles on these sites are getting harder to find and are often modded down into oblivion because those that can think for themselves are far outnumbered by the mobs of idiots, giggling with a two-year old’s mentality.
When these idiots do happen to pay attention to the news, they are far more concerned about whether people like Susan Surandon supports the war than whether our soldiers are forced to live in rat and cockroach infested quarters while they try to rehab their battered and broken bodies. They don’t want to know about the horrors of war or how the Surgeon General of the United States is blaming the troops for leaving food in their rooms and that’s why the rats and cockroaches are there.
The mice and cockroach issue was something that, in fact, the command did address last year, and that was due to soldiers leaving food in their rooms. We policed that up, and the rodent problem and cockroach problem has been corrected.
Forget about the fact that this a hospital facility that is crumbling and the rats and cockroaches are getting in through the cracks and holes in the building. No, let’s just ignore everything, blame the soldiers, and see if some famous person supports the war. Then, we’ll align ourselves according to who is our favorite famous person.
It’s absolutely ironic that misanthropic people continue to try to educate other people and try to make the world a better place, when we really despise the whole lot of you. Entertainment is supposed to be a temporary diversion from the harsh realities of life. It isn’t supposed to be life. The propaganda machine, however, runs so efficiently that the unwashed masses no longer think for themselves and cannot see that they have been made into manipulated pawns in the corporate machine. And, still, I fight on, hoping that, one day, it might all change and people will wake up from their consumerist stupor and start thinking again.
