Saturday, January 14, 2012

No News

Over the past few years I find that I've completely disconnected from any sort of current events. It happened on its own, and I vaguely noticed it happening. I got busy, news sources became annoying, whatever. One day somebody told me they were trying to confirm the second supreme court justice in a year, and I hadn't heard about the first one.

But I used to be quite conversant in current affairs. So what happened? Well, lots of reasons, I figured, things like more specific channels. I started listening to podcasts about things I was interested in, and they were focused, and didn't cover anything outside of astronomy, or photography, or whatever the topic was. And I was working a lot. Trying to do things on my own. I guessed the real world didn't rank a very high priority. But it kept popping into my head: why I wasn't aware? So I gave it some thought and came up with the real underlying reason:

Roe vs. Wade.

That was an issue of my whole life. Originally ratified right as I was becoming aware, over time it became more and more divisive and powerful. It was something that most of the people in the country were fighting on either side of to some degree. To my eye, the modern republican party, and all the dynamics opposing it became built on the issue. People voted on that issue, and sold out all their other beliefs because of it. It may be the cause of all the societal imbalance we have now, because so many people voted against their own interests because, even though those republicans had a lot of things they were wrong about, there was no way certain people were going to vote with the democrats because they were pro Roe vs. Wade.

So anyway. I guess it was in '05 or so that I tuned out of the current events thing. And I now realize it was because that's when they should have overturned Roe vs. Wade. -I might be off on the dates, I don't pay attention anymore, as I said. But around about then, in '05 or so, the republicans had what they'd been striving for for so long. They had the majority in the congress and the senate and the judiciary and the states governments, and they had the white house. And after all that time, all that effort on both sides, all that divisiveness and harm and struggle to get to that state of affairs... They launched a new campaign about gay marriage. -nobody cared about gay marriage at all before that, but the republicans spent their political power play making it an issue. And they didn't make a peep about Roe vs. Wade. And nobody else did either. No news outlet brought it up, no politician of any stripe wondered about it. No pundit, no preacher, no activist, no lobbyist, nobody. Nothing.

To me, that said everything about the nature of the news. And politics for that matter.

Not sure if I need to spell out why, but I'm bored, so unless somebody asks, I'll assume it's obvious to everybody else too.


anyway, thanks for reading,
Dave DeHetre

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