HELP - I NEED YOUR INPUT
Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2017 1:24 am
I don't need to tell anyone how dangerous these times seem. I don't need to tell about stress, fear to the point of paralysis of thought and action or of hopelessness to the point of depression. Well if you didn't need to WHY DID YOU? I felt bad enough before! GHHEEEEEZZZZZZ !!! NOW I REALLY FEEL BAD! Welcome to the socio-psychological terrorism of the Talking Heads/24 Hour a Day news cycle. This is the first in a series of coping threads. I hope to get lots of input, so when your done pondering my words of wisdom (or disagreeing with my load of crap) please leave your thoughts. {see swear-ogees in rants} If your really fired up drop me a PM. You don't need to censor yourself in those.
The 24hrad news cycle is probably the worst thing the human race has come up with since the tax system. I'm an old fa...whatever. I remember the days of THE SIX O'CLOCK NEWS ! It was a luxury you had to be there for to truly understand.
The TV had a screen that showed the picture in Black and White [and lots of shades of gray] for a starting point. That was the first disconnect. Life happened in color. The most important disconnect can be seen in the name. What a blessing. All the bad stuff got packaged up and was given to you in one hour. With local weather, sports both local, and from around the world, and commercials you only got smacked between the eyes with suffering and destruction for about 20 minutes real time. Now as cold as it may sound, you can get that amount of bad news and get on with your life. You then go on to what REALLY feels like bad news. WARNING: HUMAN NATURE ALERT There may have been a death or major illness in the family or close friends. There may have been a fire in the neighborhood and even if you don't know the people that well and nobody got hurt, that burnt out building is in your face. Those are the ones that seemed the most real. You could still get by even when you added them together. You could still read the newspaper and not go into news overload. It is not the problems in the world that are robbing you of the sense that you can't do anything. Tragedy has not forced the human race into this cowed and cowering subservience to a flickering phosphor screen. It is the unleashing of what seems like unrelenting constant horror. I can not even curse the Talking Heads for they are casualties too. The human need to know mixed with the seduction of passive presence at the scene of tragedy is what is really at fault. It's a trap that came about when, like Pandora's Box, the ability to send news from anywhere flying across continents literally at the speed of light was opened up. It then gets shown relentlessly over and over again.
They never get to show the hope. It stays trapped in the box. There are people who, though they only saw the towers come down on news broadcasts in the safety of their own homes, have PTSD reactions if they see something about the towers. Why would that be. They had a worse reaction than the vast majority of people who lived within a mile of Ground Zero. They never saw the hope. The people close up only saw them come down once, not 108 times. They only saw that bl00dy broken body once as they stumbled by, not 17 times in techno-color. But most important they never got to calm someone down. They never got to bring fresh water down, out of their apartment, to comfort the coughing people stumbling out of a cloud, looking like ghosts. They never got to see that no matter how shattering the experience, people would rise up and try to overcome the circumstance. They never got to see the hands held out to help. They only saw, again and again, the horror that human beings can perpetrate on each other. Well that's a big part of why people are feeling hopeless now. I've got to tell you people - SNAP OUT OF IT. Break away from the destructive input your forcing on your self. Turn off the news for one day. Try this as an experiment. There will of course be some contact with the news while in public, but just for a 24 hour period. Go without the news , try to distract your self from even thinking about the world farther than your eyes reach - without any electronic enhancement. It really won't hurt you at all. You might find that dealing pro-actively in the space your in and saying that that is the part of the world that you can make better may be the best thing that's happened in a long while.
The 24hrad news cycle is probably the worst thing the human race has come up with since the tax system. I'm an old fa...whatever. I remember the days of THE SIX O'CLOCK NEWS ! It was a luxury you had to be there for to truly understand.
The TV had a screen that showed the picture in Black and White [and lots of shades of gray] for a starting point. That was the first disconnect. Life happened in color. The most important disconnect can be seen in the name. What a blessing. All the bad stuff got packaged up and was given to you in one hour. With local weather, sports both local, and from around the world, and commercials you only got smacked between the eyes with suffering and destruction for about 20 minutes real time. Now as cold as it may sound, you can get that amount of bad news and get on with your life. You then go on to what REALLY feels like bad news. WARNING: HUMAN NATURE ALERT There may have been a death or major illness in the family or close friends. There may have been a fire in the neighborhood and even if you don't know the people that well and nobody got hurt, that burnt out building is in your face. Those are the ones that seemed the most real. You could still get by even when you added them together. You could still read the newspaper and not go into news overload. It is not the problems in the world that are robbing you of the sense that you can't do anything. Tragedy has not forced the human race into this cowed and cowering subservience to a flickering phosphor screen. It is the unleashing of what seems like unrelenting constant horror. I can not even curse the Talking Heads for they are casualties too. The human need to know mixed with the seduction of passive presence at the scene of tragedy is what is really at fault. It's a trap that came about when, like Pandora's Box, the ability to send news from anywhere flying across continents literally at the speed of light was opened up. It then gets shown relentlessly over and over again.
They never get to show the hope. It stays trapped in the box. There are people who, though they only saw the towers come down on news broadcasts in the safety of their own homes, have PTSD reactions if they see something about the towers. Why would that be. They had a worse reaction than the vast majority of people who lived within a mile of Ground Zero. They never saw the hope. The people close up only saw them come down once, not 108 times. They only saw that bl00dy broken body once as they stumbled by, not 17 times in techno-color. But most important they never got to calm someone down. They never got to bring fresh water down, out of their apartment, to comfort the coughing people stumbling out of a cloud, looking like ghosts. They never got to see that no matter how shattering the experience, people would rise up and try to overcome the circumstance. They never got to see the hands held out to help. They only saw, again and again, the horror that human beings can perpetrate on each other. Well that's a big part of why people are feeling hopeless now. I've got to tell you people - SNAP OUT OF IT. Break away from the destructive input your forcing on your self. Turn off the news for one day. Try this as an experiment. There will of course be some contact with the news while in public, but just for a 24 hour period. Go without the news , try to distract your self from even thinking about the world farther than your eyes reach - without any electronic enhancement. It really won't hurt you at all. You might find that dealing pro-actively in the space your in and saying that that is the part of the world that you can make better may be the best thing that's happened in a long while.