News Brake

Today is the last day I’ll read the newspaper. I just can’t stomach it anymore.

On one hand, I can’t stand the non-news puff pieces that elevate the trivial to the level of significance. I can’t tolerate the further dumbing-down of a nation through the persistent manipulation of issues, emotions and imagery. I’m beyond outrage at the complete inability or unwillingness of ‘journalists’ to ask real, probing questions, or to actually analyse what they're seeing, what they’re handed or more likely, the presskit they downloaded off the internet. I wonder if there’s a country on earth that has a less-professional, less-rigorous or more-sensationalist media industry than ours. Gossip and trivia, 24/7. I long ago stopped watching TV news and current affairs shows, of course (though I'm painfully aware that this puts me in a minority), but today marks the last time I'll read the "news"paper too.

Perhaps more than just the stupefication and spin, I just can’t stomach another story about the murders, neglect, rapes, abuse...oh I can't even list it all. In today’s paper alone, there is the 67 year old grandfather who killed his wife and two grandchildren…with an axe of all things. My mind cannot but visualise how this would have had to have occurred – an axe is not an elegant weapon (if such a thing exist), and I can’t at least ‘soften’ this news with the knowledge that they may have died quickly and without tremendous suffering. These deaths will have been absolutely brutal. Then there’s coverage of the vile man who killed his 3 children by asphyxiation in his car. I wonder if there has ever been a more dangerous time to be a child. It is a daily parade of kids being beaten to death over days and weeks, or raped repeatedly, or tortured, or starved to death.

I know that simply tuning off, or tuning out, may sound cowardly. It’ll certainly seem naïve. “You can’t just turn a blind eye to the reality around you” “You can just stick your head in the sand”. But what am I achieving by watching or reading this? What can I achieve? I find myself consuming “news” like anyone else, and none of us do anything about it. Worse still, nothing is so shocking or jarring that we as a society haven’t become bored with it by the next week, and moved onto something else. Does anyone even remember the boy who was found cut up and floating in travel bag in a suburban Sydney lake? We were outraged – or purportedly outraged – at the time, yet we couldn’t even keep talking about it for a full two weeks. We demand action, inquiries, justice: but we lack the resolve or the stamina (or dare-I-say, the attention span), to follow through.

I read the paper in the morning and I am paralysed by grief and overwhelming sadness. I cannot keep these things at arms length or stay dispassionate about them – and I’m sure that the moment I do manage to accept them, I’ll have hit a dangerous new low. Is it better to turn off, or stay tuned in until the individual cases no longer bother you? Instead of 'getting used to' these horrific stories, I cannot focus on anything else. When I read about the 18 month old decapitated during a dispute in a supermarket in the Middle East, I stopped functioning for a few hours at work. After this morning's news of the axe murders, I achieved almost nothing of real value – I just couldn’t think straight. I was thinking of everything, and thinking of nothing, at the same time.

But worse than the momentary immobilisation is the fact that I DO get over it. I am hit by a new tragedy, it floors me, but then I process it and move on. I get to a place – sooner than is probably healthy – where I have assimilated it into my world. No matter how uniquely tragic and unimaginably horrible this new violence may be, I am able to accommodate it. Is there anything so horrible that I couldn’t process it, given a day or so? And if there’s not, what does that say about me? Shouldn’t there be some things that I can’t process? I think I know the answer.

I know that in a life-or-death situation, say in a war zone, I would see things that would make my stomach churn, and I would need to quickly come to terms with them and move on – either for my own survival or for the benefit of those I was fighting with and for. But in a supposed “civil society”, and in “peace time”, what may be a necessary survival mechanism seems to border on criminal negligence.

I can of course function by shutting out these images and essentially becoming colder – and I guess that's what I always do in the end. I focus on the only possible hope left in the situation, but even handing these victims over in my mind to God’s providence and comfort seems like abandonment on my part.

How does everyone else handle it? How do you watch the news, read the papers, and take it all in? How do you even process the daily carnage? And when this is juxtaposed with glib and endless crap about footballers and starlets and their useless contributions to the world – somehow managing to make the vileness and awfulness even more appalling, how do you continuing watching/reading? I don't think I can juggle this in my mind anymore, so I have to switch off.

I'm not always like this - rarely in fact. I can usually focus on the many lovely, wonderful things around me. And I usually, when I get over myself, can get back to the state of mind that C.S.Lewis talks about in his essay about living in the Atomic Age (I've talked about that here before, so I won't rehash). I'll get back there soon, and my state of mind won't always be this fragile..

Still, the state of the world remains the same no matter what the state of my mind: and if you don’t think this world is sick, you’re just not paying attention.

Matt