Come On America – Where Is Your Common Sense?
Just watched a news segment on CNN about bio terrorism possibilities on our food crop farms. An “expert” feigns concern over the accessibility of spinach fields from a public road and has the temerity to recommend that such fields be fenced and monitored by camera. And he then turns to a heftily chained and padlocked irrigation pump, frets over how easy it would be to bypass this security and contaminate a whole field.
For heavens’ sake – how alarmist can the media get? How disruptive of our free and open society will events, less threatening to the average American than a lightning strike, become? Can anyone in their 60’s, as I am, not look back to the good ole days when we never even locked our front door, had no idea where our kids were roaming (and learning about life and about risk taking), and certainly not concerned that someone was about to steal our identity, or put anthrax in our junk mail.
We all know that good news is not news – only the horrific, scandalous, and shocking can claim the attention and ratings that “news” is now required in order to compete.
The result? Well part of the result is a world more and more becoming a world of “us” and “them”. A world divided between good and evil, between liberal and conservative, between Christian and Muslim, between red states and blue states. Moderation is an increasingly muffled call crowded out by strident yelling from opposing extremes. And we are all the less for it.
And creating two terrorists for every one we kill doesn’t seem to be an answer either. Until we as a people begin to have more understanding, more facts, more empathy, more tolerance – then we just continue to coalesce into extremes. We will not deal with causes but with results, not with symptoms but with full-blown conflict. My two cents worth.
For heavens’ sake – how alarmist can the media get? How disruptive of our free and open society will events, less threatening to the average American than a lightning strike, become? Can anyone in their 60’s, as I am, not look back to the good ole days when we never even locked our front door, had no idea where our kids were roaming (and learning about life and about risk taking), and certainly not concerned that someone was about to steal our identity, or put anthrax in our junk mail.
We all know that good news is not news – only the horrific, scandalous, and shocking can claim the attention and ratings that “news” is now required in order to compete.
The result? Well part of the result is a world more and more becoming a world of “us” and “them”. A world divided between good and evil, between liberal and conservative, between Christian and Muslim, between red states and blue states. Moderation is an increasingly muffled call crowded out by strident yelling from opposing extremes. And we are all the less for it.
And creating two terrorists for every one we kill doesn’t seem to be an answer either. Until we as a people begin to have more understanding, more facts, more empathy, more tolerance – then we just continue to coalesce into extremes. We will not deal with causes but with results, not with symptoms but with full-blown conflict. My two cents worth.
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