You don't realize what you're surrounded by until you remove yourself from it.
What now seems like a hundred years ago, we stopped getting TV service. We'd had Dish, couldn't afford it, it was turned off, and we never went back. Before service was interrupted, we had four kids in the house and that thing was going at least 16 hours a day.
Shortly after it happened, I realized what it really was; God removing television from our lives. A whole world of research as well as life was opened up when we just stopped watching, as my dad called it, "The Idiot Box". I finally understood his viewpoint. The news has devolved to the point of painful for us now.
Don't fret, if there's news, we find out about it. We haven't cut off the news of the world, but we are really careful about how it is relayed to us.
One of my favorite ways to get a quick rundown of the current events is Yahoo homepage. It's not overwhelming. It doesn't shout at me. It isn't too in depth. I can scan the headlines and go over to stories I'm interested in. It just works for me.
So, I'm over on Yahoo homepage when I come across this article in my feed.
Apparently there is some woman who is known on and from the internet as the 'green dress girl'. And for some reason, USA Today thinks her opinion warrants an article that is showing up near the top of my 'news' feed.
Not for nothing, but the fact that anything to do with fashion shows up in my feed is laughable to anyone who knows me even a little bit. But I digress.
I had no idea how intellectually bankrupt our society had become; that this drivel is considered news by a major, national print outlet.
With everything going on in the world, and call me selfish, my own life, who in the *bleep* has time to give a running rat's tail about some random person's opinion... about anything? Much less calling it news.
This is just about as nonsensical as Snoop carrying the Olympic torch.
Yeah, I said it.
I like Snoop, but he didn't belong at the Olympics. What does the man have to do with sports besides running from the po' po' in his old school G days?
Green dress girl is as news worthy as Snoop is a gifted or exemplary athlete.
I want to know how we got here.
I mean, I understand I'm Gen X and a lot of today's society doesn't make sense to me. Normally because I use logic and common sense, and that approach has mostly gone out of style.
So, I can see the how of how these viewpoints could have come around. Our educational system doesn't teach thinking anymore; it teaches memorization. Because non-thinkers are both easier to control and more cost effective for the people making the rules. Again, I digress.
What I don't understand about this ridiculousness being called a 'news' story, is that when these non-thinking, young adults go out into society and tell more seasoned with life experience people, such as myself and others around my age, why their opinionated selves think this is a 'news' story (or for that matter, anything else, they're *bleepin* kids); how is it that the rest of us out there go along with their uneducated, immature choices?
Who in the *bleep* put these short-sighted people in charge?
It must be the same people who changed A&E's format from Arts and Entertainment (i.e. A&E!) to an unending stream of murder on tap and 'cam' shows. Quite obviously a blatant case of bowing to bottom line over common sense.
James Lipton is rolling over in his grave, believe you me.
I'm sure it's also due in part to the entire machine of 24 hour stations and multiple news outlets. I guess on slow news days, they have to dig deep...?
That doesn't excuse you A&E!
This is some follow-the-money-watch-the-birdie-conspiracy-stuff to be sure!
Should I go all Oliver Stone?
Who is benefitting from our societal decline into idiocy while surrounding us with low vibrational fear?
Too on the nose?
How have women's rights regressed 50 years with women sitting on the Supreme Court?
How is Trump, a now convicted felon, still in the presidential race?
The country has gone bat crap crazy!
Nothing makes sense to those of us who still have the temerity to think!
I'm enraged! The future of our country is at stake!
But, in all honesty, I'm also Gen X. Our hands off philosophy as a generation is part of how we got here. The other part is greed, but again, I digress.
Considering current society, I am more likely to attempt to get a Netflix comedy special to air these viewpoints than I am to seek out office in order to correct the legislation that led to the errant thinking of a television-soaked society of paid-for, programmed lemmings.
That, and I grew up in New Jersey. Which makes me acutely aware that they'd shut me up and I'd be lucky to only be discredited instead of winding up in the East River.
So, I guess, I'll pretend to fall in line with the rest of the lemmings despite my capacity for independent thought by 'just doing me, Boo' as the country implodes from it's poor choices.
If you want or need me, I'll be sitting over here rolling my eyes and saying in my most Gen X New Jersey Sarcastic delivery while I shake my head, "The stuff y'all call news is fascinating." Maybe I should turn it into a meme.