Never Walked In High Heels

The year is more than three quarters of the way finished and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world. As a challenge to myself I have decided as a new years resolution back in January that I would go an entire year without watching a single news update. As a result, it would not be too much to say that from my point of view, the entire world has changed. I find that as a result of not listening to the news I have much more love to give and many more experiences that I cannot help but think of whenever I enter a pub and hear the men arguing back and forth.

The people who are directly in front of me in my life, I am able to look at and think of more often. I am no longer interested in what their argument is and how I can persuade them to agree with me. I watch people as they talk to me and become concerned with their news and their lives, realizing that what the media constantly puts on as being crucial doesn’t matter so much as examining the lives of the people directly in front of me and seeing what exactly needs to be done to improve our own condition. The most important people in the world are not the ones with the power that live in big houses and have three different secretaries, rather they are the individuals who go out of their way to show me love and are able to experience life in tandem with me.

Furthermore, not watching the news ended all hopes of there ever being any sort of justifiable television watching. The news is the appropriate form of procrastination when one really stops to think about it. It’s the pretense of being actively concerned with the world and hoping to reshape it combined with a sense of false charity that allows an individual to feel good about himself and remaining educated while still sitting on the couch all day transfixed with what the news reporter is saying.

And finally as a result of not watching the news, I worry less; or at the very least, I worry about different things. I realize that the over hyped and manufactured fantasies that scroll across the bottom of one’s television screen are just another turn in the cycle of history. And while technology, products and quite possibly the fashionable length of hem lines differ from generation to generation, the major debates do not. What is the role of the government in the life of the individual? How can we remain safe, protected, and free? What needs to be done to make the world better and what is being done to provide fewer amenities to those who actually need more?

I think with three quarters of the year already passed and myself blissfully unaware of what exactly has gone on in the news, I am forced to realize that the media hysteria which is masterfully fashioned as some sort of guerilla psychology is simply a form of socially acceptable attempts to change the world. Changing the world has never been something that is particularly well thought of or thought out within the drawing rooms of society. Talking about altering the world might be popular, but actually doing so and evading peoples’ minds and attitudes in order to see a necessary revolution is undoubtedly frowned upon. And so the people who watch the news are able to start off repetitively that which reporters have said with a twinkle in their eye, hoping that the rest of America will earn their trust and see current events from their own point of view rather than actually going forward and discovering how to improve conditions and make changes themselves.