By Keith C. Milne
I will admit that I have become a semi-news junkie. For me, that means I consume a lot more news nowadays than I used to when I was younger and working all the time. While I enjoy the fact that I am more informed now then I used to be, I have found that being rich “in the know” comes with a higher price for that increased awareness, which, at times, has created unforeseen and unwelcome bio-psycho-social consequences for me.
The negative physical (headaches, heartaches, stomach issues) I have experienced seems to be directly proportional to the level or degree of how much care and concern that I assign to each event. The more I care about what I’m being informed about, the greater the negative impact on my psyche, and my body when my anger causes my adrenal system to excrete “fight-or-flight hormones” that negatively impact my heart rate, blood pressure, and other systems.
When I learn about wrong doing, see grave injustices, and acts of criminal behavior being committed by the very people that millions of ordinary people trusted and sent to Washington to represent their interests, and were then taken advantage of, or racial injustices, or police brutality, or the human atrocities being committed by Russia against the people of Ukraine, I FEEL PAIN, FRUSTRATION, ANGER, DISAPPOINTMENT, and SADNESS. The real trouble for me is that I care entirely too much about too many things that I cannot control, which is particularly frustrating and enraging to me, especially when often I can see solutions are right at hand and readily available, but are ignored and/or underfunded or not implemented in an adequate time frame.
It’s become harder for me to watch and hear every single day, and continue learning about all the political wrong doing by Trump and company, and all of them are still without consequences more than two years out from his failed presidency.
It’s hard to see over 1 million dead from COVID-19, but no memorializing of that fact?! Nothing? 58,000 dead from the Vietnam war, and we have a huge wall with all the names of the dead soldiers engraved on it, but nothing to date other than the candle bags on the capital mall for awhile for over 1 million dead in our country alone! It’s like those people never existed! And they all died tragically in the midst of Trumpist attitudes and actions fueled by the failed ex-president, like no masking, fighting wearing masks, no vaccinations and fighting getting them while they were buying into all the conspiracy theories about the drug companies and the government plotting against them!
Listening to the lies by Fox News and the lies told and repeated by many in the GOP, like Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, George Santos, Jim Jordan, Ron Johnson and company, and many more, is infuriating to me! These people are supposed to be leaders, not inciters! Doing good things for America, not constantly saying no and doing everything under the sun to keep our country divided. I am SO GLAD Fox News is being sued for $1.6 BILLION for telling lies and keeping our country divided. Now it’s time to get rid of dividers and good for nothing idiots who get paid handsomely to go to Washington to say NO! to all things that would help your family and your bottom line.
The war in Ukraine. Seeing the wreckage, the bombed out cities, and learning about the horrors inflicted upon the people of Ukraine unlucky enough to have been captured and tortured, beaten, raped, and killed by Russian soldiers is hard to take on a daily basis. Particularly when these actions by Putin have cost virtually every single man, woman, and child in this world by making food more scarce, oil and gas more scarce and expensive, by disrupting and threatening to disrupt supply lines, and waging indirect war on many countries by threatening gas supplies during the winter when it’s needed to heat people’s homes. Yes, it’s hard to fathom and watch and imagine it as your reality. If we don’t pay attention, if we don’t stop the spread of these actions on a global level, we may some day be absorbed into their herd and now have to wait to get our orders before doing much of anything.
I have been paying attention to ALL OF IT, and it has been painful and frustrating and hard to take. My solution, for now, for myself, is to consume less news, but stay informed across multiple venues. For your own mental and physical well being, I hope you will join me in consuming less BAD NEWS everyday too!
I have been largely running scared and on adrenaline ever since Donald J. Trump broke into the political scene in a big way back in 2014-2015 and became a lot more vocal and then eventually announced his candidacy and then ran for president. Back then, I knew with ever fiber of my being that he was a crook, a liar, a cheat, and someone who was so full of himself, and into self-ego-inflation that I was amazed how he managed to not just float away like a hot-air balloon while talking or being interviewed.
I hated him then, hated him while he was president, and hate him even more now. How the bastard is still walking around and not in jail or dead for all the crimes he has committed for his entire life is beyond me. Again, I find myself getting angry just thinking about it–blood pressure goes up, I start feeling angry and frustrated, and just get more gray hair from all of it!
I exercise, I eat right, I get plenty of sleep THANK GOODNESS because they are my primary defense against mental low moods, chronic anger, frustration and feelings of what the fuck!? almost all the time! Sometimes, I find myself angry at others around me who don’t seem to be impacted at all by all of the horror on the news. I mean, how the hell can you see, hear, and learn about all of this injustice and mayhem and horror and tragedy and just carry on like nothing is up?!? How the hell do you do that!? Even more than that, how the hell do you not even tune in at all and look at, read, or try to process what is on the news? WHERE DO YOU GET OFF THINKING THAT YOU GET TO ENJOY AMERICAN FREEDOMS WITHOUT PARTICIPATING IN OUR DEMOCRACY AND STAYING INFORMED, AND AT THE VERY LEAST, VOTING!?
Once upon a long time ago, I could more easily just shrug my shoulders about the stuff I saw on the front page of the Oakland Tribune over and over as I folded the papers for my after school paper route. I remember saying oh, that’s scary or awful, but in the end would just kind of leave it at “oh well,” and I knew that I didn’t know or have any answers for all the problems in the world, and would wonder why people couldn’t get along!
I’m not sure why, but currently, bad news for me becomes an emotionally strange blend of my heart feeling heavy inside, while simultaneously wrapping itself in armor as I process what I’m reading or hearing. I wish I didn’t, but I care–too much. I feel too much. I am not able to do much about what I become privy too, but I want to do something about all of it! So, I do what I can. I pray, I give money, I vote a certain way, and talk about the issues with those who will engage me in discussing them, and I write about what I see that bothers me or that I feel is wrong or unjust.
I have tried to turn it off or listen to it less. I’ve made a pact with myself numerous times to just stop consuming all news. I’ve reminded myself that many others are living in ignorant bliss and getting along just fine, at least in as far as how they feel inside from day to day. I’m certain that those who are living in ignorant bliss feel fine, because they DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD THEY LIVE IN. Again, how do you do that!? I tell myself that if anything happens that I really need to know about I’ll hear it somewhere or someone will tell me about it. Someone inevitably will say “hey, did ya hear about . . . ” and then I’ll know that things aren’t going too well or that all hell is about to break loose.
Right now, mostly post COVID, with the war raging on, and China emboldened and thumbing their nose at us a lot more often, along with a divided country domestically, all because Trump couldn’t admit that he’d lost the election, that there has never been a greater need for us to unite as a nation and regain our former strength.
One enormous way we have weakened ourselves is by allowing lies to be told using public media venues such as Fox News on television, and the social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. There needs to be stiff consequences for the social media platforms that allow disinformation to be disseminated publicly in the name of profit, and I cannot begin to explain how Fox News has gotten away with airing so many blatant lies, so far without any real consequences, financially or otherwise.
This practice of allowing disinformation to be aired or posted online is especially damaging to America when you consider that most older, working, often very busy people consume news via television and smartphone, and the assumption is made that what is said on a public television station is the truth–otherwise, the FCC would fine them for lying about things. This is really disturbing and dangerous when you consider that Fox News is the “go to” station for most of the “Red States,” so roughly half the nation are getting either a lot of lies and misinformation, and are then living in an alternate reality based on that false information, when the other half of the nation are getting completely different information and facts.
I wish I could just turn off the news and not read or pay attention to anything other than what I liked or what makes me happy like so many people these days, but alas, I cannot, and I have decided that I will not! I care about good things, good people, and making things better, and that is a good thing. In fact after mulling this over repeatedly for quite some time now, I have come to realize that caring is good and that more people need to care about everything other than themselves for a change.
I have concluded that too many people don’t care, don’t think, are not grateful, and do nothing to contribute towards making ANYTHING better. All they are about is their own agenda and themselves. I think hyper-individualism is running amok in our country and it couldn’t be happening at a worse time. It is weakening our nation because it lets too many people off the hook and allows them to enjoy their freedom without any responsibility in doing their civic duty to ensure that our country stays free and democratic.
YOU have a duty to care about your country. There, I said it! If you don’t agree, that’s your right, but don’t be too surprised if someday America isn’t free any longer. Don’t be surprised when some authoritarian regime takes it all away and you become a slave to a foreign country or to a fascist who wants to be crowned the first king of the United States of America, like Donald Trump or Ronald DeSantis. Why am I saying that? Because you cannot have the majority leaving it up to someone else to protect them from those who would love to make our country their bitch, or their natural resource tree, or worse, their trash can and dumping ground and expect that very fear to not manifest into reality!
If you tell the world that you don’t care about your yard by letting it all go and turn into a weed patch, then first you will make enemies out of your neighbors for lowering their property value, and then they and others will begin to throw their cigarette butts, and their Dunkin Donut and McDonald’s trash out of their windows into your yard that you obviously don’t care about when they go past your house.
The same goes for our country. If hardly anyone voted except those in favor of a fascist who wants to be our first king, then those who took the time to vote for him, a minority, will get their way, and their guy will become our leader because the rest of us were too lazy or too into doing our own thing and didn’t take the time to realize that an important election was at hand, who the candidates were, then make a choice, and then actually cast a vote in favor of that person.
You say you don’t believe this will ever happen. Well, it’s already heading in that direction in many ways, and if you’ve been paying attention and doing your bit by staying informed and voting for those who have your interest and welfare in mind when elected, instead of people who give tax breaks to the already super wealthy, you would know it and be trying to prevent it.
The Baby Boomers that so many young folks like to point to as “the problem” are actually their saviors and they don’t even realize it! Better get with the program soon, otherwise you won’t like what slowly but surely comes next. You won’t see it coming, and we won’t be around to save you from yourselves any longer! I don’t even believe how many young people don’t have one tenth the sense of patriotic duty and obligation to protect and defend America and our democracy as we baby boomers did while growing up.
It’s really a shame that it takes the likes of a world war to get people to unite against a common enemy. We baby boomers were still hearing all the tales and woes of WWII from our parents and of WWI by our grandparents while growing up. All we had to share with your generation was the remnants of the Vietnam war. As horrific as it was, it was child’s play compared to the other two wars mentioned. If Iran, Russia, North Korea, and China all decide to join forces then they will have effectively divided the world into two, just like we have with our country. I hope “the great wars” that Star Trek Next Generation refers to are not the inevitable outcome of this division. Most of us will not survive, and the earth will barely be habitable if and when such a conflict takes place.
If we all do our civic duty, stay informed, and hold those empowered to lead us to account, letting no one act or get away with being above the rule of law, then we will all be able to keep enjoying our democracy and our rights to say and do what we want well into the future. But we cannot pretend that we can continue moving towards a bright future if we let our country stay divided, and then let the world become divided as well. Let’s all work towards the common good for everyone.