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living with the daily news
Working with broadcast news means that now the first thing I think about when I see breaking news is, fuck, how will this affect my workday? I start mentally tabulating all I'll have to do, what potential client requests might come up, the press conferences we will have to send to the wire.
It takes longer, after I've settled into organizing the work, that the real impact of the news hits me. It's not just a headline that nine were shot at a church in South Carolina. These people were killed. They were massacred. They were targets of a hate crime, victims of too easy gun access and unchecked, unbridled racism.
It's terrible: tragic, heartbreaking. It's infuriating and frustrating and futile. Over and over again, the same or similar headlines. I can't dwell on every awful thing I hear in the news every day, because then I'd be weighed down in relentless, hopeless cynicism and negativity. Once in a while it gets to me though. What are we doing? What are we doing to ourselves, America?
Obama gave a short, pithy speech, angry and moved and upset. But every single (news) tweet that mentions Obama attracts gads of hateful racist comments, even if he is merely expressing his grief.
How do you take this moment, this awful tragedy and hateful crime, and personify it further? Oh, it doesn't count; it's the Internet?
Think again, America. How does something like this happen? You radicalized this man. This is your America -- a young white man give a gun on his 21st birthday, used to massacre a bible study of peaceful, praying black people, proud of his Confederate racism.
The worst part is that you've made this my America too.
It takes longer, after I've settled into organizing the work, that the real impact of the news hits me. It's not just a headline that nine were shot at a church in South Carolina. These people were killed. They were massacred. They were targets of a hate crime, victims of too easy gun access and unchecked, unbridled racism.
It's terrible: tragic, heartbreaking. It's infuriating and frustrating and futile. Over and over again, the same or similar headlines. I can't dwell on every awful thing I hear in the news every day, because then I'd be weighed down in relentless, hopeless cynicism and negativity. Once in a while it gets to me though. What are we doing? What are we doing to ourselves, America?
Obama gave a short, pithy speech, angry and moved and upset. But every single (news) tweet that mentions Obama attracts gads of hateful racist comments, even if he is merely expressing his grief.
How do you take this moment, this awful tragedy and hateful crime, and personify it further? Oh, it doesn't count; it's the Internet?
Think again, America. How does something like this happen? You radicalized this man. This is your America -- a young white man give a gun on his 21st birthday, used to massacre a bible study of peaceful, praying black people, proud of his Confederate racism.
The worst part is that you've made this my America too.