Columnists
Q: War, What is it Good For?
“It’s good news week. Someone dropped a bomb somewhere, Contaminating atmosphere and blackening the sky.”
Like a lot of you, I’ve got an ear worm going on. It’s Good News Week is the song that plays over and over and over in my head these days. It was a protest song recorded in 1965 by the Hedgehoppers Anonymous. By the time I was a teenager the war in Vietnam was in full bloom. The involvement by the USA Armed Forces and, eventually the draft, was a big news item. The televised evening news brought the conflict into living rooms around the world. Often grainy black and white movies of the horrors of the war were broadcast on American and Canadian networks. What we saw on broadcast news may have happened days before, but it was sickening nonetheless. Eventually my dad stopped watching the news and often headed into our basement to have a smoke and pretend to be working on something on his workbench. Sometimes he muttered things like, “Didn’t those idiots learn anything. What the hell is wrong with them.”
And here we are, surrounded by idiots who didn’t learn anything. I don’t want to believe what is happening in the Middle East and in Ukraine. In decades past we, the uninvolved public, never had an “up close” look at the atrocities of war. What we saw was a picture or two in the newspaper or on the evening news. It was almost second-hand news. And, as we headed into this century, more often those images were generated by people (often by people in the thick of the conflict) with digital, handheld devices. There was a shift from what the reporters sent to their agencies and what was edited in studios and broadcast in the evening while we waited for dinner to be served. Now we are seeing firsthand images, videos and hearing audio of horrors happening as they appear on screen. There isn’t any buffering and rarely any editing. The news, suddenly, became very personal. We can’t use that kind of news to line the litter box or the budgie cage. The digital trail never goes away—it can be watched and shared thousands of times. We can watch, in real time, as homes and businesses are bombed. We can watch, in real time, as innocent people are tortured and killed. As we, the uninvolved public, watch all of it in the comfort of our homes.
There have been times when I have been incredibly overwhelmed by what I see on the boob-tube.On those occasions I find myself getting up from my comfy perch and leaving the room. I don’t go to the basement to have a smoke but I do fuss and fidget in the kitchen, sit on the porch or shuffle things around in the cupboards and closets. There have also been so many occasions when my mind simply feels numb and I hit “watch again”, again and again. Every re-watch makes me more anxious. Sometimes I get to the point where I can’t even form an opinion. “Our digital interactions on social media platforms can sometimes be so immersive that it’s hard for us to differentiate a conscious thought from an unconscious inception; and that inhibits our ability to pinpoint the source of our opinions.”
A: “Absolutely Nothing”
Comments (0)