The Next Day..!

The following is a direct response to what was written here...

http://www.nicolavincent-abnett.com/2015/10/digesting-news.html

Wow, weird topic Nik..!
I should first explain something though...
For the past oh, three articles now, I've read what you've written, kicked it around my noodle for a while and spilled my responses.  But the one that writes second, often has an easier job because I don't have to "fish" for thoughts, they're already provided to me (by you).
By responding to what you write, I feel like I'm only a minor contributor and all the glory (and the guts) are truly meant to be in your direction here.  I don't want to step on anyone's toes, especially not one of my writing heroes you know.

I guess I want, what I do on my end, to be viewed as a compliment to what Nik Vincent does (http://www.nicolavincent-abnett.com/), because that's how I feel when I "follow along" after her.
I'm not out to bash Nik, I'm not trying to "out do" her or better her in some way because she's the source, she started it and I couldn't write what I've been and what I want to continue to, without her.
If someday she wanted to follow an article I've originated, I would be honored and I could somehow try to view myself as something of an "equal" but even then, I know I'm still a little guy in a big bad world.
I merely want to participate in the conversation, even if I'm mostly uninvited because I think thinking thoughts is healthy, sharing them is courageous and allowing others to respond and criticize, is powerful.
I also want to point out that at no time, should my words imply that I am a stalker, creepy weirdo type because I purposely try constantly to be, as totally honest as humanly possible and I test that with what the world will tolerate by reading stuff I've written.
Then I up and change my mind again, mabes I am the weird type...

It's weird that your article concerned the newspaper.  I am a thirty nine year old father of three sons and I have been very underemployed for the past five years or so (my area of the USA has been hit very hard by recession thanks to all our lawmakers allowing foreign countries to do our labor for us...)
So recently, I applied for a paper route, something that's usually reserved for teenage kids, an after school job you know.
I found it a bit humiliating but I've had a lot of practice being humble recently and today, October sixth, was my very first day on the job.

Here I am, riding shotgun in my boss' vehicle because, get this, I have to be "trained" on my route.  Like the faith in humanity's competence level has really shrunk that far, that instead of handing a guy two hundred and seventy papers with a list of addresses, you have to be "trained".
So I roll the silly little paper up, drop it in a little plastic bag and "do the deed" right.
Except, there's warning signs "everywhere".  The once powerful paper has been reduced to a three day a week affair.  Not that there aren't actual papers printed seven days a week, merely that the delivery service only operates for three, Tuesday, Thursday and Sundays.
Where there once was insert after insert, coupons on top of coupons, now there's a little political page about a currently running politician and a page about donating canned goods to our mail carriers for a "good cause".
Now I'm all for good causes and I'll look through the pantry and see if there's something even I can offer but before you go thinking I must live in a teensy eensy 'ittle town in the nowheres, I can tell you that I currently live in a place called Grand Rapids, Michigan and we "had" a population of over one million before the loss of jobs caused us to shrink like a raisin on the steaming sidewalk.  Our paper is the Grand Rapids Press and you can look it up if you want, it's digital.
Meaning, I can't believe people can still justify the death of a single tree to produce this thing, much less produce it on a mass scale...

Now I understand that for some of our older citizens, a computer is much scarier to use than a simple piece of paper.  But will these older citizens be around for much longer and isn't the newspaper going the way of the Blockbusters and the DVD rental shops..?
Shouldn't I more accurately compare 'em to a payphone booth (remember those..?)

But I don't think the Nik meant to argue the importance of the newspaper, it's here right now and mabes it's the content she was all kinds of excited about.
And I can completely understand her reasons, the newspapers provide a more accurate view of events, they reach a group of people that can't (or won't) have access to the big bad interweb...
And their main objective is still, to inform.
But wow, when I had a free copy at the end of my work day, I pulled that puppy from it's plastic sheath and opened it for a minute or two.
What I saw horrified me.  Story upon story of tragedy, missing kids, drowned boaters whose bodies can't be recovered or found.  Murders, rapes, the general worst of humanity, complete with mugshots and scenes with yellow police tape.
I struggled to find any story within that I could interpret as "positive" and I remembered why I stopped reading the paper oh so long ago.

I don't know what types of things interest people anymore.  I'm sorta "middle" aged and I sometimes have problems knowing what interests me you know.
Much less those older or younger than me.
I even wonder at the mindset of people who enjoy reading about deaths and crimes and sad tragedies, I think the South Park even did a spoof about "murder porn" and how the boys wanted to force their parents from watching it simply because they feared it would leave them "demented".
But pause for a second.  I'm not for censorship, I'm not about to tell people what they should or shouldn't read (I'm something of a writer, crikey!)
When I was younger, parents said violent video games made kids angrier, easier to provoke to violence but I've never committed a violent crime, I didn't become demented or desensitized to blood and gore.
So praps the mind grows immune the more it's submersed, I can't tell, I'm not a shrink...

But I do understand that at one time, people lived such isolated lives, that all they cared about was the weather tomorrow and who we were currently at war with.
There was one tv news channel, there was one source of local news, your newspaper, and that was good enough because people didn't care about much else (I assume...)
As our ability to travel increased, as our minds hungered for more and more stimuli, people began watching other tv channels, they began reading from other sources.
They learned that there was a great big world out there and all you had to do was have an interest, and it became, wait for it...
Entertaining.

Reading about other places, other people, other ways of life.  It offered an escape from their boring lives, it gave them different perspectives and possibly, it made them feel a slight bit more grateful, about their simple lives (I mean at least they're not those people in the papers right...)
The line between "inform" and "entertain" grew wider, it became a lighter shade of grey and people lost the ability to distinguish completely.

I mean we realize that the weather's never very "accurate" (Michigan weather is probs a lot like England's eh, it rains, it shines, sometimes both at the same time).
We understand that those coupons aren't really saving us any money, advertisers have become the biggest tricksters huh.
And the stories about disasters on the other side of the globe, well we know we're not getting the whole story, we know it's just the tip of the iceberg we're seeing.
That's why it gets such a small amount of space, because if it was what people wanted, it'd be much bigger, with bold lettering, almost like a headline.
But, wait, oh, I can sorta feel it, where's it, yeps...
It is a headline, that's all it's meant to be.

Because if we're interested in something, if we have a passion, we look for it, we, seek it, out.  We hunt it down like a master tracker because we want to learn about it, we want to know.
If I have an interest in Guatemala, I look 'em up on my computer and bam, I have all kinds of people writing whole books about it.
If I have an interest in Vegans and their nutritional issues, I type it in the Google and blamo again, there's all I could want right.

The responsibility has faded, from the media, to provide us with info, to ourselves.  Because we got too big, too diverse, too interested in a huge scale of topics.
To ask one company or organization to cater to all of our needs, even those in a particular region, it's sorta silly eh.
The responsibility has become our own, if we want to know, we seek it out instead of expecting it to come to us.
If an organization wanted to try to cover the interests of a large group of people, it would have to publish a dictionary sized newspaper and can you imagine the loss of tree life there..?
Oh, wait again, do you guys remember dictionaries?  They were the books you had to look up words in, you know, argh...

The sad state of the world is, much like the Catholic church, they don't care about you.  They don't care about me or our interests or "what's important".
They're not out to save the world or even a couple of starving babies in Africa.
They want one thing (just like your mother warned you).  Your money.
They want you to buy their product, support their advertisers and if you could, please stop dying because then they'd have to print the newspaper only once a week.

If you wanted a method to distinguish the ones that care from those that don't, look for the ads.  If there aren't any, well it probs means that someone is really just trying to share their thoughts, their words, for a good cause.
If there are ads, their cause is money.

I want to thank Nik once again, I sincerely hope you don't stop typin' anytime soon missy, I almost hope your topics get even crazier because I'd like to see how far we could go with 'em.
Please take no offense at any of my words, ever.  While they may agitate at times, I have nothing but respect for people that share their thoughts.