Monday, September 11, 2006
My thoughts on the news
From a letter to a friend, in which I explained my abstinence from news consumption:
August 11, 2006
Pretty much all the news I receive is from my direct conversations with people. I hear of news events from my friends/colleagues/acquaintances when they deem them important enough to talk about. Thus, gel bombs get the same kind of personal prioritizing as tomorrow's job interview or the baby spitting up. My news is filtered by the personal lenses of people I directly interact with. So, I don't learn so much about news events as much as I do about what's important to people; what's important to my people.
In the headline poetry, I am mangling the headlines so much, that my relationship with their actual content is fairly perverted. Though I do "struggle" with curiosity for certain stories.
I have a similar thing happening with fiction, in all forms from TV to movies to the "fictive narratives" of "literature". As I reduce my exposure to distant, cultural, or anonymous stories, I feel like I become less distracted from the stories that my people and I create everyday.
What was the last line in "Grapes of Wrath", uttered by Ma? Something like "we [common people] have always been here and will always be here" ... That's more than I can say for the celebrity of those deemed worthy of our headlines. I guess that instead of being an activist, I think I'm being a livavist. Hehe.
Rather than feeling "in limbo" (which I have totally felt before when traveling, it can be erie, can't it?), I feel "in eternity" -- maybe different words and spin for the same experience. But I like it.
A criticism can easily be leveled towards my self-centeredness. But since I believe, in a studied Zen kind of way, that that my self awareness and awakeness make me a better human, I'd answer that self centeredness isn't the sin the Religious and Political would have us believe.
Cheers,
Kahty
August 11, 2006
Pretty much all the news I receive is from my direct conversations with people. I hear of news events from my friends/colleagues/acquaintances when they deem them important enough to talk about. Thus, gel bombs get the same kind of personal prioritizing as tomorrow's job interview or the baby spitting up. My news is filtered by the personal lenses of people I directly interact with. So, I don't learn so much about news events as much as I do about what's important to people; what's important to my people.
In the headline poetry, I am mangling the headlines so much, that my relationship with their actual content is fairly perverted. Though I do "struggle" with curiosity for certain stories.
I have a similar thing happening with fiction, in all forms from TV to movies to the "fictive narratives" of "literature". As I reduce my exposure to distant, cultural, or anonymous stories, I feel like I become less distracted from the stories that my people and I create everyday.
What was the last line in "Grapes of Wrath", uttered by Ma? Something like "we [common people] have always been here and will always be here" ... That's more than I can say for the celebrity of those deemed worthy of our headlines. I guess that instead of being an activist, I think I'm being a livavist. Hehe.
Rather than feeling "in limbo" (which I have totally felt before when traveling, it can be erie, can't it?), I feel "in eternity" -- maybe different words and spin for the same experience. But I like it.
A criticism can easily be leveled towards my self-centeredness. But since I believe, in a studied Zen kind of way, that that my self awareness and awakeness make me a better human, I'd answer that self centeredness isn't the sin the Religious and Political would have us believe.
Cheers,
Kahty
# posted by kachen : 9:58 AM
