What's News? 1st Entry

When I was nine and living in southern California, I thought that news was a subgenre of horror. My mother made me watch Dateline and the 11 o’clock news on the local stations. Growing up as I did, in an environment that encouraged a particular disdain for police and authority, I found little use for news in my early life.

Until recently, I still found the news an intolerable chore, occasionally to be checked so that I could avoid embarrassment at the dinner table or at Grandpa’s house. I wanted to sound sophisticated, but deep down, I found it dry and monotonous and dreary. The news made the world seem gray and miserable.

Slowly, something inside me shifted. Call it maturity. My mother calls it a miracle. Either way, as a side-effect the news began to matter to me. I took a genuine interest in what was happening. I suppose I realized that these things I read, heard and saw really mattered. They had direct consequences on what I did during any given day.

The implications of those things that seem not to impinge upon life as a young American, those things that happen abroad, are expanding and becoming more acute as the world shrinks faster than Nicole Ritchie’s waistline. What formerly was outside or “away” has reached, and at times crashed, inside our guarded boundaries.

In this sense, a bombing in Turkey, which appears to be a struggle within the country, can be felt here at home. In today’s environment, Turkey isn’t that far away.

Left: A guard reacts to injured civilians after the explosion.

It’s hard for me to hear about that and not think of the fact that so many of our interests, not just money but our troops and the people who love them, are invested in the region. There is such thing as a world community, and I believe we are the largest part of it.

I think that this is a proper moment to take pause and mention that from the next post on, the blog won’t be nearly so personal. But I feel that some background on my belief system is necessary to understand some of the viewpoints and issues that are sure to arise in this space as time goes on.

With that said, I am more than welcoming to any perspectives that stand against my own, so I promote any comment or response to anything read or seen as part of this blog. I’m sure there will be some positions of mine that won’t be viewed positively by all. I will be updating the blog twice a week, so there will be more than ample opportunity for me to step on somebody’s toes.

If I step on your toes, I’d love to hear about it.

I look forward to the prospects of what this blog might yield. It might be nothing. Perhaps, for me, some personal enlightenment. But no matter what, I think it will be fun.

So until later, I’m out.