The Softness of Being Human

It's been a rough week for a lot of the world. I tried to limit how much of the Japan catastrophe I let in, but there's that side of us humans, that side that feels its own mortality too keenly and so we are drawn to death and dying in a strange sort of relief that it wasn't our turn this time. But the scope of it is beyond us to take in all at once.

We can imagine it on a personal level when we see ourselves in the desperate faces hoping against all truth that a loved one survived. We grab our own loved ones tighter and try to look away, try not to see that it ends the same for us all, that the only difference is timing and how many of ourselves we leave behind to mourn.

I wasn't surprised to hear I wasn't the only one who was too numb to cry, too horrified by the magnitude of the triple disasters to let ourselves cry. I suspect it's  because there were simply too many dead to mourn them properly, to give them the tears they deserved. So we held it all back out of respect for the ones that would be missed if we cried for just a few.

But when this photograph appeared on numerous websites, I lost it completely. I cried for everyone I had ever lost because of a small, helpless dog who couldn't understand what had happened to his world. I knew, his human knew, everyone around him knew. But all that poor little dog knew was that something horrible had happened and now his human was there to love and comfort him, that it was going to be alright. It was the simplicity of it that got to me as it did to everyone who saw this photograph.

And then there's the horror of Libya. Like many people I have mixed feelings. I can't support war. I can't support killing. I'm the kind of person who picks up spiders and puts them outside. I don't want death anywhere near my hands. And yet, here's a cruel and ruthless dictator savagely murdering his own people. As horrible as that is, as much as I want there to be some other way to make him stop, as much as I want him to wake up and decide to be a decent human being, I know that's not going to happen.

I want to believe this is different somehow, these missiles are different than the ones that were launched in Iraq over oil, using the same language of justification, a dictator killing his own people. I'm jaded at the mercy missions of governments because I know there's oil in Libya too and the gluttony of the world for it makes killing more likely than if the country was nothing but olive trees and geckos.

Altruism always comes wrapped in bloody, oil-drenched rags and we wipe up our guilt by saying we're taking out a bad person instead of saying a lot of innocent people are dying too. How is our killing any different than his? Because it's for a better reason, a more noble cause? It is still death. It is still dying. It is still bombs and missiles and oil fields that mean much more than they should. Maybe a small dog caught in the rubble of a building brought down by a missile launched for "humanitarian" reasons would allow us to cry over the solution being as awful as the problem.

Anger is also a reprieve from the tears I'm sure would flow for days if I didn't have it as a valve to keep them in check. I'm angry at the photographs of elderly people fending for themselves in the rubble, the hardship they face simply because they are too old to get out and start over. I'm used to America not giving a shit about its old people. It's a selfish country and one obsessed with youth. All you have to do is listen to politicians talk about Social Security, Medicare, and other programs to know if a similar disaster hit here it would be the young and powerful first and the old could rot in the streets for all they would care.

But to see Japan inflicted with this lack of respect for its elderly is equally as devastating as the wreckage all around them. I want to yell at the TV loud enough that they will hear me: get out there and save the old people you selfish fucks! But I know the young are suffering too and so the old are expendable. Life is for those with years ahead of them, not behind them. It's another form of missiles being dropped to save lives.

My anger is also for nuclear reactors that were old and needed to be replaced, updated, modernized, but because Japan seems to have adopted the most disgusting of American greed, these ticking time bombs were left to decay so the shareholders, the investors, the powerful rich and wealthy could increase their profit margins.

It points out clearer than ever that if this could happen in Japan, a country devastated once before by the worst of nuclear power, then what hope have we in America of ever having a safe form of energy? What kind of safety considerations would the Enrons, the Exxons, the Koch Brothers, the Massey Mine owners, BP's and Halliburtons feel worth spending money on? I wouldn't trust them as far as I can spit, but here they are in charge of our energy sources, with nothing but their endless greed as a guarantee that money means more to them than human lives.

And today I received an email from Lydia. She wants to give her kids one more Christmas. She struggles through chemotherapy, radiation, all kinds of horrible medications just to drag out a few more months just so her children can have another Christmas.

Like I said, it's been a rough week.

Reflecting Pond by northwest_photograph
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The Softness of Being Human

Flinging Poo at the Monkeys

Ever since the earthquake and tsunami hit I've been watching the coverage from various sources, both online and on television. I rarely watch TV, especially for news, and the crap that passes for coverage on American network and cable news is appalling when you compare it with international sources. Before I could find the cable station with straight from Japan coverage, I had to wade through an embarrassment of faux-journalism that was painful to watch.

First of all, it has never been more obvious that the talking heads on television are not journalists but merely actors paid to read lines written by someone else. They're so used to handing off the story of the day to whatever propaganda spouting figure the network has provided for them that they are helpless when it comes to any in depth reporting done on the fly.

They fumble, stumble, and end up repeating inane phrases over and over again, as they desperately try and pass the story off to the expert who isn't there because there's no party line to push when it's a tragedy that happens somewhere else.

Give them a few days. I'm sure the experts will show up soon to promote more oil drilling in our backyards and less regulations in order to free up the supplies. How can the Corporate Borg resist such a natural disaster opportunity to promote their slash, burn, and get stinking rich policies?

But until then there's always "the man/woman on the street" who is asked how they feel so they can blather on in mindless fashion like some idiot wind-up toy until they're mercifully cut off for yet another commercial. And when the talking heads return after a slew of totally inappropriate perky ads, there's always a near feeding frenzy over some poor unfortunate fool who claims a friend of a friend of a cousin three times removed who knows someone who may have been in Japan AT THE VERY MOMENT THE DISASTER HIT!

All this pales when measured against the bigger shame, and that is how the news actors, when they finally get their new scripts and no longer have to try and improvise, talk down to the viewers. They know that most of their audience probably consists of knuckle-draggers and geriatric viewers who haven't quite figured out that new-fangled internet thing so they're forced to watch TV News. They know their audience's knowledge of Science probably came from visiting the Creation Museum, and watching the Jesus was an Alien channel that ignores any history older than 6000 years.

They know they have to explain the simplest concepts such as what is an earthquake and did god do it or is it more of that global warming (snicker snicker) nonsense?  If they don't simplify it to barely breathing level, they know their audience will go back to watching Jesus's spaceship land on the pyramids, or some gossip station that talks breathlessly of people they've neve met but knos more about than members of their own families.

I joke but I was shocked at how simple the concepts were that they're forced to explain to what is probably the most uneducated and unsophisticaed audience on the planet. "There are two kinds of earthquakes; shallow ones and deep ones." It's obvious they're assuming their audience slept through the third grade, and they're probably right.

Meanwhile, online you can get live coverage with real experts who actually study earthquakes, who know something about tsunamis other than surfing jokes, who have no agenda to push other than letting you know the facts of what happened. You have journalists on the ground following leads such as nuclear plants that are about to explode, instead of American TV who uses the potential tragedy as an opportunity to promote coal mining and oil drilling and only covers the nuclear plant by saying horrid things like "the Japanese have a lot more reason than we do to fear nukes." Seriously. This came out of the mouth of an American news actor.

What is lost in all this simplistic reporting of monumental events is that when you have a news source such as Al-Jazeera English ,the Guardian, the BBC, and online blogs that carry live twitter feeds from people on the ground, you have an audience that expects a certain level of reporting. This expectation creates a literate and educated journalistic pool more interested in bringing you the story than creating or slanting it to fit a particular advertiser or network owner.

American news,  instead of reporting the facts, repeatedly slants the story to create the propaganda they're pushing. The talking heads are interchangeable and do little but act as set decorations with moving lips. Instead of in depth reporting, the American audience gets Joe Doofus on the street talking stupid shit that is supposed to be average, but instead comes off sounding totally idiotic and nonsensical.

 It beats having to cover the story and it sure beats educating the audience beyond the point where simple Scientific concepts are too difficult for them to grasp. Because if the viewers get too smart, then they won't buy the stupid, meaningless crap that takes up most of the half hour anyway. And that's what American TV really exists for: to sell stuff. They could care less about the news, about the audience, about the idiocy of the viewing public. All they care is that you buy enough of the advertised crap so they can keep their job reading propaganda written by their overlords to pass on to viewing morons.

The Daily Lies by orsobear
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Flinging Poo at the Monkeys