I lived, as my wife will tell you, under a news blackout bubble. She came to this conclusion because when she would come home and start a conversation about some big news event in the world, I would look at her lamely, shrug and generally appear like someone without the slightest clue of what was going on. She would sigh, then proceed to update me on all that had happened.
This second (and sometimes third or fourth) generation news update was something I could deal with. It didn’t come with gruesome pictures of violence or ravaging fires and was very often done quickly and concisely. As an author and columnist, Micki has her finger on the pulse of what is news, and so her review of those events was more pleasant to me than any other news media.
For the most part, though, I prefered to ‘be in the dark’ about most all events. Looking back across 35 years, I have a glorious bubble of darkness where I’m sure many noteworthy events occurred both locally, nationally and internationally.
The reasons behind this voluntary self sequestering are many.
First, as a child, one of my great heroes of ‘The News’ was Jim O’Brien, an anchorman and meteorologist who was killed while skydiving.
At that time, I knew that when I grew up I was going to be just like him. His sudden and shocking death hit me very hard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7FnrFP9t2M
After that, seeing how difficult it was for his colleagues and family, I began thinking that the life of a TV news anchor was perhaps too much in the public eye. An unusual sentiment for a six year-old boy. The next tragedy that made me dislike the news, hit much closer. My father, an electrician, was terribly electrocuted while working in underground utility tunnels in Reading, PA. He lived, thankfully, but I’ll never forget the local news reports and how terrified I was by all of it.
Finally, just after I moved here in 2001, Micki called me from work to tell me that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. [In respect to those who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks, I will not post pictures of the towers or other pictures from that week. I find it insensitive of newspapers and news agencies who continue to do so.] I switched on the news, watched for many hours along with every other American and then I switched it off for good. After that, I had trouble with any form of news. If we watched it before bed, I invariably had nightmares. I tried to listen to brief sound bites, but after everything else, the news just seemed like a whole lot of bad and not a lot of good (with the exception of the occasional water skiing squirrel.)
For the next several years, I excused myself from conversations regarding the news, and except for reading Micki and Warren’s columns on Saturday mornings and the Sunday funnies, I avoided any form of news media. If there was something incredibly important or noteworthy, Micki would relay it to me.
Now, however, I can no longer afford to be ignorant of the news. When you work in a Library, as I do, you are a guardian to the gateway of information. You have to be able to speak intelligently about local, national and international news; know what’s new in books and movies, and keep abreast of current events in the world. With the growth of social media, internet news and smartphones, I’ve been able to control the input from media sources to me to prevent news burn out, and to keep myself involved just enough to be able to do my job well.
Every morning I look at the paper, check out the Yankee’s scoreboard (and sometimes the Red Sox, just to be sure they’re not gaining), read the comics, the ‘Law Log’, skip happily over ‘Dear Abby,’ glance skeptically at my horoscope and dig in to the Op-Eds and movie reviews and weather.
I’m in no way a ‘news addict’ and I never will be. I still love and miss the hermetic silence of my self-willed exile and I still seek it out now and again. I have to admit, though, that here is something empowering about being ‘in the know’.
In the long run I still prefer to hold tight to the old adage: No news is good news.
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