SOLE SUBJECT One subject dominates just about every conversation you have this week. Regardless of where you may have started you will end up discussing some phase of news about the floods along our Gulf coast.
If you try to escape from flood reports and more of the same by turn away from the five or six news channels on your TV set to other cable and stations which clutter the air in a constant old reruns, low budget cooking, gardening or home improvement demonstrations,you have strange sensation of being a quitter, of running away from, or avoiding the harsh reality of the day's events.
This "what else is happening?" feeling drives you the long string
of cable and some random stations each pushing their own cause. That ,too, can be extremely dull and, often, that sameness chases us back to the news stations.
There is a marked danger we may try to take on too much news in a constant stream of re-hashed details.. When you start see the same film clips being show all over again, its time to take a break from "watching". The very people who are this week's prime watchers of new events will, next week, avoid watching news. Their entire awareness of the situation will be depend almost entirely on the spoken word of a favorite TV "talking head" who spouts the news each evening.
Each of us abrogates a portion of our civic duty when we fail to keep up with the news events of the day. It can so easily be overdone with our modern communication advantages - radio, TV, FAX or our computers. If we go through spells of "over-listening" or "over-watching" we are asking for trouble we do not need.
The decisions we are going to be called upon to make in the near future may determine what, why and how something strange happened to us - as a nation - in the Fall of the year of 2005. We must make certain such decisions are founded on intelligent awareness of what has taken place.
A.L.M. September 4, 2005 [c356wds]
