28 May 2020
News has always been an addiction for me. From the time when I was a kid during the Vietnam War, when I would watch Peter Jennings introduce the graphic footage out of South Vietnam to 9/11 and beyond, I was focused on news. Somewhere in the 1990s I gave up on American news and started watching the CBC. Even then I did not trust the perspective on events I was being given by the major networks. Don’t get me wrong, I always felt the reporters were trying to get to the truth, but it seemed the corporations behind the broadcasts skewed most stories into a very pro-American light.
Over the years I have tried various news magazines. Time, Newsweek, Maclean’s, I have had subscriptions to them all for extended periods. Each disappointed me over time. The only print magazine for news I still subscribe to is Mother Jones. Yes, they have a viewpoint. Yes, that viewpoint is quite left/liberal. However, the reporters get their facts and numbers right. Being a small magazine that can’t afford to get the facts wrongs. The litigation would be fatal. As it stands the magazine has been subject to strike suits by corporate wankers, like that West Virginia coal magnate that is such a friend of Trump. Mother Jones won the suit, but it cost them so much money.
Since I have retired to get my news, I listen to two podcasts, Up First and Marketplace. I like Up First because it focuses is on only three stories and gives them a fair amount of time and analysis each. But some days I just can’t make my way through the whole short program.
Today the stories were on Covid-19’s death toll and what comes next. Also covered were the death of a black man at police hands in Minneapolis and China’s placing its foot down on Hong Kong. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum it is hard to unpack and internalize these stories.
Probably the easiest one to take in is the Hong Kong story. Why? Well it is not happening here. While this story and a hundred other stories from China give great pause as to whether the next great armed conflict will be the United States and China, it isn’t here now so we can put that on a mental back burner. We shake our heads and internally acknowledged China is eating our proverbial lunch or shaking us down for our lunch money if you want a different metaphor. But we can turn that off, if doesn’t have exigency, it doesn’t have immediacy.
What we can’t turn off is the race war that is still going on in this country. Will we ever come to terms with race and racism in this country? It isn’t like we haven’t had enough time. After you have watched the Minneapolis video how can you eat a meal? How can you face the fact of the broad divide in how justice is administered across the races? The man was saying he could not breath, so move your damn knee off his neck. If he was a white teenager the cops would have listened.
What we can’t turn off is the pandemic. 100,000 dead…a very small number as compared to the overall United States population of 340 million. But despite the belief of some people that Covid-19 would just go away or just vanish, it hasn’t. And listening to the most informed clinicians, it won’t at any point soon. If we don’t deal with this as a health crisis, it may get much worse. And we have allowed this to be turned into a political thing. Even the Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell acknowledges and agrees with the CDC’s recommendations of face mask use and a six-foot social distance. But still we founder in our response to this “health” crisis.
Somedays I just want to sit on my back porch all day and watch the squirrels and chipmunks do their crazy races from one side of my yard to the other. I mean it is fun to watch them dash up a tree and fall from a branch too thin. Somedays I just can’t take the churning that even three news stories causes in my guts. But come tomorrow I will try and listen again. Why? Well I learned a long time ago that no matter how much truth and reality hurt, ignorance is not a solution.
And as to the what occurred in Minneapolis, well you got to view it through the light of what happened in Central Park. We are becoming a feudal society. We are becoming a hateful society. This has to end. Brown v Board was more than a half century ago. Can’t we just accept people as people? Black, Asian, Hispanic, whatever let justice, and the enforcement of the laws, be equal.
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