All the News That's Fit to Depress

[marmar]

from the American Prospect:



All the News That's Fit to Depress

Staying informed has become -- for so many of us -- a moral obligation that feels like hell.

Courtney E. Martin | December 3, 2007 | web only



"I turn on Tape Nine, Omission/Partial Omission. When sadness-inducing events occur, the guys says, invoke your Designated Substitute Thoughtstream. Your DTS might be a man falling off a cliff but being caught by a group of good friends. It might be a bowl of steaming soup, if one likes soup…My DTS is tapping a thin rock wall with a hammer. When that wall cracks, there's another wall underneath."

--George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

* * *
It is Saturday. I am at a coffee shop in Brooklyn with my boyfriend and one of our best friends -- nice guys, guys who care deeply about what is going on in the world beyond fantasy football, music, and their motley crew of friends. We're drinking coffee, eating bagels, and reading my New York Times.

I tend to stick to a quick perusal of the Times online, in addition to a half dozen blogs and online news sites (like this one) during the week, but on the weekends I like to hold the paper in my hands, let my fingertips get blackened, really immerse myself in what's been happening. When I was just out of college and had very little money, I used to wait until late Sunday evening and then scour my neighborhood for discarded papers. When I finally started making money from my writing, one of my first "indulgences" was a weekend subscription to The New York Times. (So fancy, I know.)

Reading it each weekend has become more than an attempt to stay informed. It has become an exercise in witnessing, an act of pure will. Some weekends it feels like a masochistic, last-ditch effort to keep myself from going numb. Some weekends, I can hardly read the headlines without feeling myself being pulled into a morass of 21st century existential pain over the challenges of living aware in a globalized world with so much violence, soulless bureaucracy, and disappointing leadership.

This weekend is no different. As the boys and I flip through the paper, we find the following headlines:


Market Bomb Shatters Lull for Baghdad

Bombs in Northern India Kill 13 Near Courthouses

Barely Getting By, Too Proud to Seek Help and Facing a Cold Maine Winter.


After awhile we look up and get engrossed in a conversation that will last long after our coffee has gone cold -- what, in God's name, are we supposed to do with this information? What are we -- three well-educated, big-hearted, human beings -- supposed to do when we get up from these tables and discard this paper, knowing about the dead people and dreams in Iraq, the injured in India, the starving and old in Maine? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=all_the_news_thats_fit_to_depress

[AspenRose]

1. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes

Which is why it's good to take a DU/news holiday from time to time. At least I know I have to.

It's awful to read the news and feel so powerless/hopeless so often.