Saturday, August 19, 2006

Ab-Reaction

So someone DID ask me about the battery recall. I leaped up onto my chair and shouted "I'm not going to take it anymore!" Then I closed my applications, logged off the server, shut down Windows, powered off the computer, undocked it, and prepared to HURL it out the window! Except by then everyone had wandered away, I was feeling kinda foolish standing on my chair getting the seat all dusty, and anyway the window was closed. So I sat back down and mused on our tendency to latch on to any piece of information and BEAT it to death. Take the JonBenet thing,you'd think we had wrung the last drop out of that sorry mess long ago, but apparently there is still a little more to come. And digging up Jimmy Hoffa, how many of you out there even remember who he was and what he was doing that got him so comprehensively eradicated, raise your hands? That's what I thought. And what would they know if they did find his bones? Well, that he was killed. A long time ago. Duh. Maybe we do this because our own lives are so dull, we take vicarious pleasure out of the lives and events of other people? The global version of gossiping over the back fence. It would be nice to blame the media for the feeding frenzies, but you know they only give us what we want.

Maybe if we could learn to take what we hear with a handful of salt, and wait for the whole story instead of just the 20 second sound bite, we wouldn't be so pulled here and there by the winds of speculation and hysteria.

But what do I know? Maybe if we didn't have the media to feed us, we'd sit around a fire and make up tales of gods and demons to entertain ourselves, the stuff of legends. Then gradually they would stop being legends, become "historical fact", we would argue about whose version was right, found organizations based on our version, go to war to kill the guys who believe something else. Yeah, maybe we would do that.

Has anyone heard anything about a big quake in California?

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