Reading the newspaper or Let’s find out who got raped, murdered and decapitated! Yeah!
There was nothing I loved better than waking up, making coffee and getting the newspaper in the morning. It was what my dad bred me to do I think. He’s the same way. Well…. I stopped reading the newspaper about 4 years ago. Why? I think our whole american way of life is too much focused on violence and fear. (Work too, but that’s off topic.) The movie “Bowling for Columbine” really sums up the problem well.
Canada and the US have the same number of guns per capita. But the yearly death rate from gunshots in Canada is like 10 people, while for the US it’s 10’s of thousands. One of my canadian friends said that if they hear what sounds like a gunshot in Canada, they think, “Well, it couldn’t be a gun, so what was that noise?”
Canadians don’t lock their doors. Michael Moore, the creater of “Bowling”, actually went up to about 5 houses in the movie and opened the doors and went in! Funny. The people inside were nice and asked him if he needed anything!
Bottom line: We in the US are too fearful. Why? The media and the government.
Let me just give two examples, before I sign off, because I know most fellow americans aren’t buying this.
Example #1.
The terrorist warning levels the government issues. Why are they doing this? It’s serves no purpose, right? Oh yes it does!
1) It allows them to cover their ass. “Not our fault, we warned you!”
2) It keeps us cowering so that we give away our hard won personal freedoms in the name of security. This one is the worst one. The sig on my emails reads:
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“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security,
deserve neither liberty nor security” –Ben Franklin
Example #2.
My parents were telling me that there was an article in the newspaper about geocaching, one of the fun things my family does with our GPS. Go to: http://www.geocaching.com/ to learn all about it. Basically, you go to the web site, find a treasure location near you (you enter your zip code for example), enter the coordinates in your GPS and go find it. You can take something from the treasure if you leave something. It’s a great incentive for kids. Most adults just find it without taking anything. Anyway, guess what the newspaper had to say about geocaching. Well, they said, it turns out that there is a geocache somewhere hidden in poison ivy. So you want to be extra careful when you do this. The media had once again been able to inject fear into something harmless and fun.
How do you counter this BS? You can’t let any of this into your consciousness. The only way, short of leaving the country, is to stop reading and watching mainstream news. Now, when I buy a newspaper, I go right to the “Life” and the “Business” sections. I toss the “front” and “local” sections. I read slashdot too.
nuff said.
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